ANATOMY OF CRITICISM
Four Essays
Anatomy of
Criticism
FOUR ESSAYS
Ly NORTHROP FRYE
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1957, by Princeton University Press
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HELEN AE UXORI
PREFATORY STATEMENTS AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book forced itself on me while I was trying to write some-
thing else, and it probably still bears the marks of the reluctance
with which a great part of it was composed. After completing a
study of William Blake {Fearful Symmetry ^ ^947)?- ^ detetmined
to apply the principles of literary symbolism and Biblical typology
which I had learned from Blake to another poet, preferably one
who had taken these principles from the critical theories of his
own day, instead of working them out by himself as Blake did.
I therefore began a study of Spenser's Faerie Queene, only to dis-
cover that in my beginning was my end. The introduction to
Spenser became an introduction to the theory of allegory, and that
theory obstinately adhered to a much larger theoretical structure.
The basis of argument became more and more discursive, and less
and less historical and Spenserian. I soon found myself entangled
in those parts of criticism that have to do with such words as
''myth," "symbol," "ritual," and "archetype," and my efforts to
make sense of these words in various published articles met with
enough interest to encourage me to proceed further along these
lines. Eventually the theoretical and the practical aspects of the
task I had begun completely separated, ^^^at is here offered is
pure critical theory, and the omission of all specific criticism, even,
in three of the four essays, of quotation, is deliberate. The present
book seems to me, so far as I can judge at present, to need a com-
plementary volume concerned with practical criticism, a sort of
morphology of literary symbolism.
I am grateful to the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
for a Fellowship (1950-1951) which gave me leisure and freedom
to deal with my Protean subject at the time when it stood in the
greatest need of both.
I am also grateful to the Class of 1932 of Princeton University,
and to the Committee of the Special Program in the Humanities
at Princeton, for providing me with a most stimulating term of
work, in the course of which a good deal of the present book took
its final shape. This book contains the substance of the four public
lectures delivered in Princeton in March 1954.
The "Polemical Introduction" is a revised version of "The
vii
PREFATORY STATEMENTS
Function of Criticism at the Present Time/' University of Toronto
Quarterly^ October 1949, also reprinted in Our Sense of Identity,
ed. Malcolm Ross, Toronto, 1954. ^ revised and
expanded version of 'Towards a Theory of Cultural History/'
University of Toronto Quarterly, July 1953- The second essay
incorporates the material of "Levels of Meaning in Literature,"
Kenyon Review, Spring 1950; of "Three Meanings of Symbolism,"
Yale French Studies No. 9 (1952); of "The Language of Poetry,"
Explorations 4 (Toronto, 1955); and of "The Archetypes of Litera-
ture," Kenyon Review, Winter 1951. The third essay contains the
material of "The Argument of Comedy," English Institute Essays
ig^ 8 , Columbia University Press, 1949; “Characterization in
Shakespearean Comedy," Shakespeare Quarterly, July 1953;
"Comic Myth in Shakespeare," Transactions of the Royal Society
of Canada (Section II), June 1952; and of "The Nature of Satire,"
University of Toronto Quarterly, October 1944. The fourth essay
contains the material of "Music in Poetry," University of Toronto
Quarterly, January 1942; of "A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,"
Kenyon Review, Autumn 1951; of "The Four Forms of Prose
Fiction," Hudson Review, Winter 1950; and of "Myth as Informa-
tion," Hudson Review, Summer 1954. I am greatly obliged to the
courtesy of the editors of the above-mentioned periodicals, the
Columbia University Press, and the Royal Society of Canada, for
permission to reprint this material. I have also transplanted a few
sentences from other articles and reviews of mine, all from the same
periodicals, when they appeared to fit the present context.
For my further obligations, all that can be said here, and is not
less true for being routine, is that many of the virtues of this book
are due to others: the errors of fact, taste, logic, and proportion are
poor things, but my own.
N. F.
Victoria College
University of Toronto
via
Contents
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION 3
FIRST ESSAY. Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes
Fictional Modes: Introduction 35
Tragic Fictional Modes 35
Comic Fictional Modes 43
Thematic Modes 52
SECOND ESSAY. Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols
Introduction yi
Literal and Descriptive Phases :
Symbol as Motif and as Sign 73
Formal Phase: Symbol as Image 82
Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype 95
Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad 115
THIRD ESSAY. Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths
Introduction 131
Theory of Archetypal Meaning (1):
Apocalyptic Imagery 141
Theory of Archetypal Meaning (2):
Demonic Imagery 147
Theory of Archetypal Meaning (3):
Analogical Imagery 151
Theory of Mythos: Introduction 1 58
The Mythos of Spring: Comedy 163
The Mythos of Summer; Romance 186
The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy 206
The Mythos of Winter; Irony and Satire 223
F 0 URTH"ESSAY. Rhetorical Criticism; Theory of Genres
Introduction 243
The Rhythm of Recurrence: Epos 251
IX
CONTENTS
The Rhythm of Continuity: Prose 263
The Rhythm of Decorum: Drama 268
The Rhythm of Association: Lyric 270
Specific Forms of Drama 282
Specific Thematic Forms (Lyric and Epos) 293
Specific Continuous Forms (Prose Fiction) 303
Specific Encyclopaedic Forms 315
The Rhetoric of Non-Literary Prose 326
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION 341
NOTES 357
GLOSSARY 365
INDEX 369
X
ANATOMY OF CRITICISM
Four Essays
Polemical Introduction
This book consists of “essays," in the word's original sense of a
trial or incomplete attempt, on the possibility of a synoptic view
of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism.
The primary aim of the book is to give my reasons for believing in
such a synoptic view; its secondary aim is to provide a tentative
version of it which will make enough sense to convince my readers
that a view, of the kind that I outline, is attainable. The gaps in
the subject as treated here are too enormous for the book ever to
be regarded as presenting my system, or even my theory. It is to
be regarded rather as an interconnected group of suggestions which
it is hoped will be of some practical use to critics and students of
literature. Whatever is of no practical use to anybody is expendable.
My approach is based on Matthew Arnold's precept of letting
the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been
much endeavor and little attempt at perspective. All the essays
deal with criticism, but by criticism I mean the whole work of
scholarship and taste concerned with literature which is a part
of what is variously called liberal education, culture, or the study
of the humanities. I start from the principle that criticism is not
simply a part of this larger activity, but an essential part of it.
The subject-matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism
is evidently something of an art too. This sounds as though criti-
cism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on
pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power. On
this theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but
lack both the power to produce it and the money to patronize it,
and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture
to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and
increasing the strain on his public. The conception of the critic
as a parasite or artist manque is still very popular, especially among
artists. It is sometimes reinforced by a dubious analogy between
the creative and the procreative functions, so that we hear about
the “impotence" and “dryness" of the critic, of his hatred ^for
genuinely creative people, and so on. The golden age of anti-
critical criticism was the latter part of the nineteenth century, but
some of its prejudices are still around.
However, the fate of art that tries to do without criticism is
5
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through
''popular^' art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste
natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste
which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spon-
taneously creative “folk.” These theories have had a fair trial;
they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history
and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An
extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated
with the “art for art's sake” catchword, thinks of art in precisely
the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically
civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual masonic
gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs
of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to
both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of
art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation
assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.
One can find examples which appear to support both these
views; but it is clearly the simple truth that there is no real cor-
relation either way between the merits of art and its public re-
ception. Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not
because he was a greater dramatist; Keats was less popular than
Montgomery, but not because he was a better poet. Consequently
there is no way of preventing the critic from being, for better or
worse, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradi-
tion. Whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is
equally the result of the publicity of criticism. A public that tries
to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or
likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's
sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment
of civilized life itself. The only way to forestall the work of criti-
cism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism
that lynching has to justice.
There is another reason why criticism has to exist. Criticism can
talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music
it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say
anything. And, whatever it sounds like to call the poet inarticulate
or speechless, there is a most important sense in which poems are
as silent as statues. Poetry is a disinterested use of words: it does
not address a reader directly. When it does so, we usually feel that
the poet has some distrust in the capacity of readers and critics to
4
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
interpret his meaning without assistance, and has therefore dropped
into the sub-poetic level of metrical talk (“verse"' or “doggerel")
which anybody can learn to produce. It is not only tradition that
impels a poet to invoke a Muse and protest that his utterance is
involuntary. Nor is it strained wit that causes Mr. MacLeish, in
his famous Ars Poetica^ to apply the words “mute," “dumb," and
“wordless" to a poem. The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a
wonderful flash of critical insight, is not heard but overheard. The
axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what
he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows.
To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to
assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge
existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from
the art it deals with.
The poet may of course have some critical ability of his own,
and so be able to talk about his own work. But the Dante who
writes a commentary on the first canto of the Paradiso is merely
one more of Dante's critics. What he says has a peculiar interest,
but not a peculiar authority. It is generally accepted that a critic
is a better judge of the value of a poem than its creator, but there
is still a lingering notion that it is somehow ridiculous to regard
the critic as the final judge of its meaning, even though in practice
it is clear that he must be. The reason for this is an inability to
distinguish literature from the descriptive or assertive writing which
derives from the active will and the conscious mind, and which is
primarily concerned to “say" something.
Part of the critic's reason for feeling that poets can be properly
assessed only after their death is that they are then unable to pre-
sume on their merits as poets to tease him with hints of inside
knowledge. When Ibsen maintains that Emperor and Galilean is
his greatest play and that certain episodes in Peer Gynt are not
allegorical, one can only say that Ibsen is an indifferent critic of
Ibsen. Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable
document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian, criticism nobody
would give it more than about a B plus. Critics of Shakespeare
are often supposed to be ridiculed by the assertion that if Shake-
speare were to come back from the dead he would not be able to
appreciate or even understand their criticism. This in itself is
likely enough: we have little evidence of Shakespeare's interest in
criticism, either of himself or of anyone else. Even if there were
5
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
such evidence, his own account of what he was trying to do in
Hamlet would no more be a definitive criticism of that play, clearing
all its puzzles up for good, than a performance of it under his
direction would be a definitive performance. And what is true of
the poet in relation to his own work is still more true of his opinion
of other poets. It is hardly possible for the critical poet to avoid
expanding his own tastes, which are intimately linked to his own
practice, into a general law of literature. But criticism has to be
based on what the whole of literature actually does: in its light,
whatever any highly respected writer thinks literature in general
ought to do will show up in its proper perspective. The poet speak-
ing as critic produces, not criticism, but documents to be examined
by critics. They may well be valuable documents: it is only when
they are accepted as directives for criticism that they are in any
danger of becoming misleading.
The notion that the poet necessarily is or could be the definitive
interpreter of himself or of the theory of literature belongs to the
conception of the critic as a parasite or jackal. Once we admit that
the critic has his own field of activity, and that he has autonomy
within that field, we have to concede that criticism deals with
literature in terms of a specific conceptual framework. The frame-
work is not that of literature itself, for this is the parasite theory
again, but neither is it something outside literature, for in that case
the autonomy of criticism would again disappear, and the whole
subject would be assimilated to something else.
This latter gives us, in criticism, the fallacy of what in history is
called determinism, where a scholar with a special interest in geog-
raphy or economics expresses that interest by the rhetorical device
of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with what-
ever interests him less. Such a method gives one the illusion of
explaining one's subject while studying it, thus wasting no time.
It would be easy to compile a long list of such determinisms in
criticism, all of them, whether Marxist, Thomist, liberal-humanist,
neo-Classical, Freudian, Jungian, or existentialist, substituting a
critical attitude for criticism, all proposing, not to find a conceptual
framework for criticism within literature, but to attach criticism
to one of a miscellany of frameworks outside it. The axioms and
postulates of criticism, however, have to grow out of the art it deals
with. The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature,
to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical
6
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that
field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from
theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these.
To subordinate criticism to an externally derived critical attitude
is to exaggerate the values in literature that can be related to the
external source, whatever it is. It is all too easy to impose on litera-
ture an extra-literary schematism, a sort of religio-political color-
filter, which makes some poets leap into prominence and others
show up as dark and faulty. All that the disinterested critic can do
with such a color-filter is to murmur politely that it shows things
in a new light and is indeed a most stimulating contribution to
criticism. Of course such filtering critics usually imply, and often
believe, that they are letting their literary experience speak for
itself and are holding their other attitudes in reserve, the coinci-
dence between their critical valuations and their religious or politi-
cal views being silently gratifying to them but not explicitly forced
on the reader. Such independence of criticism from prejudice, how-
ever, does not invariably occur even with those who best under-
stand criticism. Of their inferiors the less said the better.
If it is insisted that we cannot criticize literature until we have
acquired a coherent philosophy of life with its center of gravity
in something else, the existence of criticism as a separate subject
is still being denied. But there is another possibility. If criticism
exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a con-
ceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary
field. The word “inductive"' suggests some sort of scientific pro-
cedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a “pure”
or “exact” science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nine-
teenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us. The writing
of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are
involved in the historian's treatment of evidence, and that the
presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history
from legend. It may also be a scientific element in criticism which
distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the
superimposed critical attitude on the other. The presence of science
in any subject changes its character from the casual to the causal,
from the random and intuitive to the systematic, as well as safe-
guarding the integrity of that subject from external invasions.
However, if there are any readers for whom the word “scientific”
7
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
conveys emotional overtones of unimaginative barbarism, they
may substitute ''systematic'' or "progressive" instead.
It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in
criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the
assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a
scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is ex-
amined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically;
fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically.
Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology.
Either literary criticism is scientific, or all these highly trained and
intelligent scholars are wasting their time on some kind of pseudo-
science like phrenology. Yet one is forced to wonder whether schol-
ars realize the implications of the fact that their work is scientific.
In the growing complication of secondary sources one misses that
sense of consolidating progress which belongs to a science. Research
begins in what is known as "background," and one would expect
it, as it goes on, to start organizing the foreground as well. Telling
us what we should know about literature ought to fulfil itself in
telling us something about what it is. As soon as it comes to this
point, scholarship seems to be dammed by some kind of barrier,
and washes back into further research projects.
So to "appreciate" literature and get more direct contact with
it, we turn to the public critic, the Lamb or Hazlitt or Arnold or
Sainte-Beuve who represents the reading public at its most expert
and judicious. It is the task of the public critic to exemplify how
a man of taste uses and evaluates literature, and thus show how
literature is to be absorbed into society. But here we no longer
have the sense of an impersonal body of consolidating knowledge.
The public critic tends to episodic forms like the lecture and the
familiar essay, and his work is not a science, but another kind of
literary art. He has picked up his ideas from a pragmatic study
of literature, and does not try to create or enter into a theoretical
structure. In Shakespearean criticism we have a fine monument of
Augustan taste in Johnson, of Romantic taste in Coleridge, of Vic-
torian taste in Bradley. The ideal critic of Shakespeare, we feel,
would avoid the Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian limitations
and prejudices respectively of Johnson, Coleridge, and Bradley.
But we have no clear notion of progress in the criticism of Shake-
speare, or of how a critic who read all his predecessors could, as
8
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
a result, become anything better than a monument of contemporary
taste, with all its limitations and prejudices.
In other words, there is as yet no way of distinguishing what is
genuine criticism, and therefore progresses toward making the
whole of literature intelligible, from what belongs only to the
history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable
prejudice. I give an example of the difference between the two
which amounts to a head-on collision. In one of his curious, bril-
liant, scatter-brained footnotes to Munera Vulveris, John Ruskin
says:
Of Shakspeare's names I will afterwards speak at more length;
they are curiously— often barbarously— mixed out of various tradi-
tions and languages. Three of the clearest in meaning have been
already noticed. Desdemona— “3vorSat/xoz^ta,"'mzscmbIe fortune—
is also plain enough. Othello is, I believe, ''the carefub'; all the
calamity of the tragedy arising from the single flaw and error
in his magnificently collected strength. Ophelia, "serviceable-
ness,'' the true, lost wife of Hamlet, is marked as having a Greek
name by that of her brother Laertes; and its signification is once
exquisitely alluded to in that brother's last word of her, where
her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of the churl-
ish clergy:— "A ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou
liest howling."
On this passage Matthew Arnold comments as follows:
Now, really, what a piece of extravagance all that is! I will not
say that the meaning of Shakspeare's names (I put aside the
question as to the correctness of Mr. Ruskin's etymologies) has
no effect at all, may be entirely lost sight of; but to give it that
degree of prominence is to throw the reins to one's whim, to
forget all moderation and proportion, to lose the balance of one's
mind altogether. It is to show in one's criticism, to the highest
e.xcess, the note of provinciality.
Now whether Ruskin is right or wrong, he is attempting genuine
criticism. He is trying to interpret Shakespeare in terms of a con-
ceptual framework which belongs to the critic alone, and yet re-
lates itself to the plays alone. Arnold is perfectly right in feeling
that this is not the sort of material that the public critic can
directly use. But he does not seem even to suspect the existence
9
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
of a systematic criticism as distinct from the history of taste. Here
it is Arnold who is the provincial. Ruskin has learned his trade
from the great iconological tradition which comes down through
Classical and Biblical scholarship into Dante and Spenser, both
of whom he had studied carefully, and which is incorporated in
the medieval cathedrals he had pored over in such detail. Arnold
is assuming, as a universal law of nature, certain ""plain sense''
critical axioms which were hardly heard of before Dry den's time
and which can assuredly not survive the age of Freud and Jung
and Frazer and Cassirer. .
What we have so far is, on one side of the ""study of literature,"
the work of the scholar who tries to make it possible, and on the
other side the work of the public critic who assumes that it exists.
In between is ""literature" itself, a game preserve where the student
wanders with his native intelligence his only guide. The assump-
tion seems to be that the scholar and the public critic are connected
by a common interest in literature alone. The scholar lays down
his materials outside the portals of literature: like other offerings
brought to unseen consumers, a good deal of such scholarship
seems to be the product of a rather touching faith, sometimes only
a hope that some synthetizing critical Messiah of the future will
find it useful. The public critic, or the spokesman of the imposed
critical attitude, is apt to make only a random and haphazard use
of this material, often in fact to treat the scholar as Hamlet did
the grave-digger, ignoring evervthing he throws out except an odd
skull which he can pick up and moralize about.
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions,
not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they
are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions di-
rectly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them. Most
of the answers, such as Newman's ""liberal knowledge is its own
end," merely appeal to the experience of those who have had the
right experience. Similarly, most ""defenses of poetry" are intel-
ligible only to those well within the defenses. The basis of critical
apologetics, therefore, has to be the actual experience of art, and
for those concerned with literature, the first question to answer
is not ""What use is the study of literature?" but, ""What follows
from the fact that it is possible?”
Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the
mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study
10
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
of science. A precisely similar training of the mind takes place, and
a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up. If this unity
comes from literature itself, then literature itself must be shaped
like a science, which contradicts our experience of it; or it must
derive some infornging power from an ineffable mystery at the
heart of being, which seems vague; or the mental benefits alleged
to be derived from it are imaginary, and are really derived from
other subjects studied incidentally in connection with it.
This is as far as we can get on the assumption that the scholar
and the man of taste are connected by nothing more than a com-
mon interest in literature. If this assumption is true, the high
percentage of sheer futility in all criticism should be honestly
faced, for the percentage can only increase with its bulk, until
criticizing becomes, especially for university teachers, merely an
automatic method of acquiring merit, like turning a prayer-wheel.
But it is only an unconscious assumption— at least, I have never
seen it stated as a doctrine— and it would certainly be convenient if
it turned out to be nonsense. The alternative assumption is that
scholars and public critics are directly related by an intermediate
form of criticism, a coherent and comprehensive theory of litera-
ture, logically and scientifically organized, some of which the stu-
dent unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main principles
of which are as yet unknown to us. The development of such a
criticism would fulfil the systematic and progressive element in
research by assimilating its work into a* unified structure of knowl-
edge, as other sciences do. It would at the same time establish an
authority within criticism for the public critic and the man of
taste.
We should be careful to realize what the possibility of such an
intermediate criticism implies. It implies that at no point is there
any direct learning of literature itself. Physics is an organized body
of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learn-
ing physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished
from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore
impossible to 'learn literature'': one learns about it m a certain
way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature.
Similarly, the difficulty often felt in "teaching literature" arises
from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is
ail that can be directly taught. Literature is not a subject of study,
but an object of study: the fact that it consists of words, as we
II
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
have seen, makes us confuse it with the talking verbal disciplines.
The libraries reflect our confusion by cataloguing criticism as one
of the subdivisions of literature. Cnt icism, rather, is to arLwha t
history is to action and philoMph^^to^wisd^ im ij^ion
of a human productive power which i n itself does not speak. And
fuff's "there iTnothing which the philosopher cannot consider
philosophically, and nothing which the historian cannot consider
historically, so the critic should be able to construct and dwell in
a conceptual universe of his own. This critical universe seems to be
one of the things implied in Arnold’s conception of culture.
I am not, therefore, saying that literary criticism at present must
be doing the wrong thing and ought to be doing something else.
I am saying that it should be possible to get a comprehensive view
of what it actually is doing. It is necessary that scholars and public
critics should continue to make their contributions to criticism.
It is not necessary that the thing they contribute to should be
invisible, as the coral island is invisible to the polyp. In the study
of literary scholarship the student becomes aware of an undertow
carrying him away from literature. He finds that literature is the
central division of the humanities, flanked on one side by history
and on the other by philosophy. As literature is not itself an or-
ganized structure of knowledge, the critic has to turn to the con-
ceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the
philosopher for ideas. Asked what he is working on, the critic will
invariably say that he is working on Donne, or Shelley’s thought,
or the 1640-1660 period, or give some other answer implying that
history, philosophy, or literature itself is the conceptual basis of
his criticism. In the unlikely event that he was concerned with
the theory of criticism, he would say that he was working on a
‘'general” topic. It is clear that the absence of systematic criticism
has created a power vacuum, and all the neighboring disciplines
have moved in. Hence the prominence of the Archimedes fallacy
mentioned above: the notion that if we plant our feet solidly
enough in Christian or democratic or Marxist values we shall be able
to lift the whole of criticism at once with a dialectic crowbar. But
if the varied interests of critics could be related to a central expand-
ing pattern of systematic comprehension, this undertow would
disappear, and they would be seen as converging on criticism in-
stead of running away from it.
One proof that a systematic comprehension of a subject actually
12
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
exists is the ability to write an elementary textbook expounding
its fundamental principles. It would be interesting, to see what such
a book on criticism would contain. It would not start with a clear
answer to the first question of all: '"What is literature?"' We have
no real standards to distinguish a verbal structure that is literary
from one that is not, and no idea what to do with the vast penumbra
of books that may be claimed for literature because they are written
with "style,” or are useful as "background,” or have simply got
into a university course of "great books.” We then discover that we
have no word, corresponding to "poem” in poetry or “play” in
drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for
Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find
ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for
ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such
a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize.
So much for page one of our handbook. Page two would be the
place to explain what seems the most far-reaching of literary facts,
the distinction in rhythm between verse and prose. But it appears
that a distinction which anyone can make in practice cannot be
made as yet by any critic in theory. We continue to riffle through
the blank pages. The next thing to do is to outline the primary
categories of literature, such as drama, epic, prose fiction, and the
like. This at any rate is what Aristotle assumed to be the obvious
first step in criticism. We discover that the critical theory of
genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. The very word
"genre” sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable
and alien thing it is. Most critical efforts to handle such generic
terms as "epic” and "novel” are chiefly interesting as examples of
the psychology of rumor. Thanks to the Greeks, we can distinguish
tragedy from comedy in drama, and so we still tend to assume that
each is the half of drama that is not the other half. When we come
to deal with such forms as the masque, opera, movie, ballet, puppet-
play, mystery-play, morality, commedia delF arte, and Zauberspiel,
we find ourselves in the position of the Renaissance doctors who
refused to treat syphilis because Galen said nothing about it.
The Greeks hardly needed to develop a classification of prose
forms. We do, but have never done so. We have, as usual, no word
for a work of prose fiction, so the word "novel” does duty for every-
thing, and thereby loses its only real meaning as the name of a
genre. The circulating-library distinction between fiction and non-
^3
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
fiction, between books which are about things admitted not to be
true and books which are about everything else, is apparently ex-
haustive enough for critics. Asked what form of prose fiction Gul-
liver's Travels belongs to, there are few critics who, if they could
give the answer '‘Menippean satire,” would regard it as knowledge
essential for dealing with the book, although some notion of what
a novel is is surely a prerequisite for dealing with a serious novelist.
Other prose forms are even worse off. Western literature has been
more influenced by the Bible than by any other book, but with all
his respect for “sources,” the critic knows little more about that
influence than the fact that it exists. Biblical typology is so dead
a language now that most readers, including scholars, cannot con-
strue the superficial meaning of any poem which employs it. And
so on. If criticism could ever be conceived as a coherent and sys-
tematic study, the elementary principles of which could be ex-
plained to any intelligent nineteen-year-old, then, from the point
of view of such a conception, no critic now knows the first thing
about criticism. What critics now have is a mystery-religion with-
out a gospel, and they are initiates who can communicate, or
quarrel, only with one another.
A theo ry of criticism,, whose principles apply to the whole o f
Ijteratur e and account for^ vgiy valid fypp nf c ritical proced um is
what I think Aristotle meant bv poetics. Aristotle seems to me to
approach poetry as a biologist would approach a system of organ-
isms, picking out its genera and species, formulating the broad laws
of literary experience, and in short writing as though he believed
that there is a totally intelligible structure of knowledge attainable
about poetry which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it,
but poetics. One would imagine that, after two thousand years of
post-Aristotelian literary activity, his views on poetics, like his views
on the generation of animals, could be re-examined in the light
of fresh evidence. Meanwhile, the opening words of the PoeticSj, in
the Bywater translation, remain as good an introduction to the
subject as ever, and describe the kind of approach that I have tried
to keep in mind for myself:
Our subject being poetry, I propose to speak not only of the
art in general but also of its species and their respective capacities;
of the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number
and nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
any other matters in the same line of inquiry. Let us follow the
natural order and begin with the primary facts.
Of course literature is only one of many arts, but this book is
compelled to avoid the treatment of aesthetic problems outside of
poetics. Every art, however, needs its own critical organization,
and poetics will form a part of aesthetics as soon as aesthetics be-
comes the unified criticism of all the arts instead of whatever it
is now.
Sciences normally begin in a state of naive induction: they tend
first of all to take the phenomena they are supposed to interpret as
data. Thus physics began by taking the immediate sensations of
experience, classified as hot, cold, moist, and dry, as fundamental
principles. Eventually physics turned inside out, and discovered
that its real function was rather to explain what heat and moisture
were. History began as chronicle; but the difference between the
old chronicler and the modem historian is that to the chronicler
the events he recorded were also the structure of his history, where-
as the historian sees these events as historical phenomena, to be
connected within a conceptual framework not only broader but
different in shape from them. Similarly each modern science has had
to take what Bacon calls (though in another context) an induc-
tive leap, occupying a new vantage ground from which it can see
its former data as new things to be explained. As long as astronomers
regarded the movements of heavenly bodies as the structure of as-
tronomy, they naturally regarded their own point of view as fixed.
Once they thought of movement as itself explicable, a mathema-
tical theory of movement became the conceptual framework, and
so the way was cleared for the heliocentric solar system and the
law of gravitation. As long as biology thought of animal and
/egetable forms of life as constituting its subject, the different
branches of biology were largely efforts of cataloguing. As soon as
it was the existence of forms of life themselves that had to be ex-
plained, the theory of evolution and the conceptions of protoplasm
and the cell poured into biology and completely revitalized it.
It occurs to me that literary criticism is now in such a state of
naive induction as we find in a p riinitive..srj£DceJd^ mat erials, the
nfaster pieceTof Ii^ m to £ L -are not yet regarded as phenom^naJta
be explained in terms of a conceptual framework w hich criticism
^5
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
^Jone possesses* They are still regarded as somehow constituting
theTmm^w6rk~or structure of criticism as well. suggest that i t
ti me for critkism to lea p_to a new ground frorp-which it can
^sco^^lyhat Ae^pjgamzingpr.c^iSalmi^ its conceptual
framework are. C riticism seems to be badl y in need ^of„a_cpordinat-
ing principle, a cent ral hypothesis which, like the theory o f evo^ion
IrTSioIogyTwill see the phenomena it deals wi th as parts Q f^.:w^le.
The first postulate of this inductive leap is the same as that of
any science: the assumption of total coherence. Simple as this
assumption appears, it takes a long time for a science to discover
that it is in fact a totally intelligible body of knowledge. Until it
makes this discovery, it has not been born as an individual science
but remains an embryo within the body of some other subject. The
birth of physics from “natural philosophy'' and of sociology from
“moral philosophy" will illustrate the process. ^ Jt is also appro xb
mately true that the mudern sdences have develop in fhe"orSr
of their closeness to mathematics.-j3ius~~pEy sics and a stronomy
B^anJo^SSiiiGelh^mod^^ 5Biemjstry
in the eighteenth cen tury, biolog^ ^ the nineteeg fiTa^ the
sUgaTsc ^ces in the twenfTethTTFcAicism is a ^science, it is clea rly
^" 'sog a T^ience. and if it is devel oping
iTatleast not an anach ronism. Meanwhile, the myopia of speciali-
^Tion remains “anTnseparSre’^part of naive induction. From such
a perspective, “general" questions are humanly impossible to deal
with, because they involve “covering" a frighteningly large field.
The critic is in the position of a mathematician who has to deal
with numbers so large that it would keep him scribbling digits
until the next ice age even to write them out in their conventional
form as integers. Critic and mathematician alike will have some-
how to invent a less cumbersome notation.
Naive induction thinks of literature entirely in terms of the
enumerative bibliography of literature: that is, it sees literature
as a huge aggregate or miscellaneous pile of discrete “works."
Clearly, if literature is nothing more than this, any systematic
mental training based on it becomes impossible. Only one organiz-
ing principle has so far been discovered in literature, the principle
of chronology. This supplies the magic word “tradition," which
means that when we see the miscellaneous pile strung out along
a chronological line, some coherence is given it by sheer sequence.
But even tradition does not answer all our questions. Total literary
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
history gives us a glimpse of the possibility of seeing literature as
a complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of
formulas that can be studied in primitive culture. We next realize
that the relation of later literature to these primitive formulas is
by no means purely one of complication, as we find the primitive
formulas reappearing in the greatest classics— in fact there seems
to be a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to
them. This coincides with a feeling we have all had: that the
study of mediocre works of art remains a random and peripheral
form of critical experience, whereas the profound masterpiece
draws us to a point at which we seem to see an enormous number
of converging patterns of significance. We begin to wonder if we
cannot see literature, not only as complicating itself in time, but
as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of center that
criticism could locate.
It is clear that criticism cannot be a systematic study unless there
is a quality in literature which enables it to be so. We have to adopt
the hypothesis, then, that just as there is an order of nature behind
the natural sciences, so literature is not a piled aggregate of “works,"'
but an order of words. A belief in an order of nature, however, is
an inference from the intelligibility of the natural sciences; and if
the natural sciences ever completely demonstrated the order of
nature they would presumably exhaust their subject. Similarly,
criticism, if a science, must be totally intelligible, but literature, as
the order of words which makes the science possible, is, so far as
we know, an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries, and
would be even if new works of literature ceased to be written. If
so, then the search for a limiting principle in literature in order
to discourage the development of criticism is mistaken. The absurd
quantum formula of criticism, the assertion that the critic should
confine himself to “getting out” of a poem exactly what the poet
may vaguely be assumed to have been aware of “putting in,” is one
of the many slovenly illiteracies that the absence of systematic criti-
cism has allowed to grow up. This quantum theory is the literary
form of what may be called the fallacy of premature teleology. It
corresponds, in the natural sciences, to the assertion that a phe-
nomenon is as it is because Providence in its inscrutable wisdom
made it so. That is, the critic is assumed to have no conceptual
framework: it is simply his job to take a poem into which a poet
has diligently stuffed a specific number of beauties or effects, and
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
complacently extract them one by one, like his prototype Little
Jack Homer.
The first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize
and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in
a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowl-
edge. This includes all the sonorous nonsense that we so often
find in critical generalities, reflective comments, ideological perora-
tions, and other consequences of taking a large view of an unor-
ganized subject. It includes all lists of the best novels or poems
or writers, whether their particular virtue is exclusiveness or in-
clusiveness. It includes all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value-
judgments, and all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputa-
tions of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange.
That wealthy investor Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the
market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his
peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight
flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish. This sort of thing
cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can
only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely
leisure-class gossip. The history of taste is no more a part of the
structure of criticism than the Huxley-Wilberforce debate is a part
of the structure of biological science.
I believe that if this distinction is maintained and applied to
the critics of the past, what they have said about real criticism will
show an astonishing amount of agreement, in which the outlines
of a coherent and systematic study will begin to emerge. In the
history of taste, where there are no facts, and where all truths have
been, in Hegelian fashion, split into half-truths in order to sharpen
their cutting edges, we perhaps do feel that the study of literature
is too relative and subjective ever to make any consistent sense. But
as the history of taste has no organic connection with criticism, it
can easily be separated. Mr. Eliot's essay The Function of Criticism
begins by laying down the principle that the existing monuments
of literature form an ideal order among themselves, and are not
simply collections of the writings of individuals. This is criticism,
and very fundamental criticism. Much of this book attempts to
annotate it. Its solidity is indicated by its consistency with a hun-
dred other statements that could be collected from the better
critics of all ages. There follows a rhetorical debate which makes
tradition and its opposite into personified and contending forces,
i8
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
the former dignified with the titles of Catholic and Classical, the
latter ridiculed by the epithet ''Wnhiggery/' This is the sort of
thing that makes for confusion until we realize how easy it is to
snip it off and throw it away. The debate is maintained against
Mr. Middleton Murry, who is spoken of approvingly because '‘he
is aware that there are definite positions to be taken, and that now
and then one must actually reject something and select something
else/' There are no definite positions to be taken in chemistry or
philology, and if there are any to be taken in criticism, criticism
is not a field of genuine learning. For in any field of genuine learn-
ing, the only sensible response to the challenge “stand” is Falstaff s
'‘so I do, against my will.” One’s “definite position” is one's weak-
ness, the source of one’s liability to error and prejudice, and to gain
adherents to a definite position is only to multiply one’s weakness
like an infection.
The next step is to realize that criticism has a great variety of
neighbors, and that the critic must enter into relations with them
in any way that guarantees his own independence. He may want
to know something of the natural sciences, but he need waste no
time in emulating their methods. I understand that there is a
Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy’s novels
in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does
not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged. The
critic may want to know something of the social sciences, but
there can be no such thing as, for instance, a sociological “approach”
to literature. There is no reason why a sociologist should not work
exclusively on literary material, but if he does he should pay no
attention to literary values. In his field Horatio Alger and the
writer of the Elsie books may well be more important than Haw-
thorne or Melville, and a single issue of the Ladies' Home Journal
worth all of Henry James. "Die critic is similarly under no obliga-
tion to sociological values, as the social conditions favorable to the
production of great art are not necessarily those at which the social
sciences aim. The critic may need to know something of religion,
but by theological standards an orthodox religious poem will give
a more satisfactory expression of its content than a heretical one:
this makes nonsense in criticism, and there is nothing to be gained
by confusing the standards of the two subjects.
Literature has been always recognized to be a marketable product,
its producers being the creative writers and its consumers the culti-
^9
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
vated readers, with the critics at their head. From this point of
view the critic is, in the metaphor of our opening page, the mid-
dleman. He has some wholesaler's privileges, such as free review
copies, but his function, as distinct from the bookseller's, is essen-
tially a form of consumer's research. I recognize a second division
of labor in literature, which, like other forms of mental construc-
tion, has a theory and a practice. The practitioner of literature and
the producer of literature are not quite the same, though they
overlap a good deal; the theorist of literature and the consumer
of literature are not the same at all, even when they co-exist in
the same man. The present book assumes that the theory of litera-
ture is as primary a humanistic and liberal pursuit as its practice.
Hence, although it takes certain literary values for granted, as
fully established by critical experience, it is not directly concerned
with value-judgements. This fact needs explanation, as the value-
judgement is often, and perhaps rightly for all I know, regarded as
the distinguishing feature of the humanistic and liberal pursuit.
Value-judgements are subjective in the sense that they can be
indirectly but not dir ectly communicated . When they are fashiona-
BlFdFgenrally iccepted, they look objective, but that is all. The
demonstrable value-judgement is the donkey's carrot of literary
criticism, and every new critical fashion, such as the cunent fashion
for elaborate rhetorical analysis, has been accompanied by a belief
that criticism has finally devised a definitive technique for separat-
ing the excellent from the less excellent. But this always turns out
to be an illusion of the history of taste. Value-judgements are
founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never
be founded on value-judgements. Shakespeare, we say, was one
of a group of English dramatists working around 1600, and also
one of the great poets of the world. The first par t of this is a
st atement of fact, the second j j^ value-judgement so gen erall y ac-
ce pted as to p ass for a statement of fact. BuFirTsTTot a statement
o fifact. It remains a value- judgement,“ah 3 lioFT 3 Sred^f systematic
criti cism can eve r beattacKedTto^ it
There are two types of value-judgements, comparative and posi-
tive. Criticism founded on comparative values falls into two main
divisions, according to whether the work of art is regarded as a prod-
uct or as a possession. The former develops biographical criticism,
which relates the work of art primarily to the man who wrote it. The
20
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
latter we may call tropical criticism, and it is primarily concerned
with the contemporary reader. Biographical criticism concerns itself
largely with comparative questions of greatness and personal author-
ity. It regards the poem as the oratory of its creator, and it feels most
secure when it knows of a definite, and preferably heroic, personal-
ity behind the poetry. If it cannot find such a personality, it may
try to project one out of rhetorical ectoplasm, as Carlyle does in
his essay on Shakespeare as a ''heroic"' poet. T/opical criticism deals
comparatively with style and craftsmanshi]^, with complexity of
meaning and figurative assimilation. It tends to dislike and be-
little the oratorical poets, and it can hardly deal at all with heroic
personality. Both are essentially rhetorical forms of criticism, as
one deals with the rhetoric of persuasive speech and the other with
the rhetoric of verbal ornament, but each distrusts the other's
kind of rhetoric.
Rhetorical value- judgements are closely related to social values,
and are usually cleared through a customs-house of moral meta-
phors: sincerity, economy, subtlety, simplicity, and the like. But
because poetics is undeveloped, a fallacy arises from the illegiti-
mate extension of rhetoric into the theory of literature. The in-
variable mark of this fallacy is the selected tradition, illustrated
with great clarity in Arnold's "touchstone" theory, where we pro-
ceed from the intuition of value represented by the touchstone
to a system of ranking poets in classes. The practice of comparing
poets by weighing their lines (no new invention, as it was ridiculed
by Aristophanes in The Frogs) is used by both biographical and
tropical critics, mainly in order to deny first-class rating to those in
favor with the opposite group.
When we examine the touchstone technique in Arnold, how-
ever, certain doubts arise about his motivation. The line from
The Tempest, "In the dark backward and abysm of time," would
do very well as a touchstone line. One feels that the line "Yet a
tailor might scratch her where'er she did itch" somehow would
not do, though it is equally Shakespearean and equally essential
to the same play. (An extreme form of the same kind of criticism
would, of course, deny this and insist that the line had been inter-
polated by a vulgar hack.) Some principle is clearly at work here
which is much more highly selective than a purely critical experi-
ence of the play would be.
Arnold's "high seriousness" evidently is closely connected with
21
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
the view that epic and tragedy, because they deal with ruling-
class figures and require the high style of decorum, are the aristo-
crats of literary forms. All his Class One touchstones are from, or
judged by the standards of, epic and tragedy. Hence his demotion
of Chaucer and Burns to Class Two seems to be affected by a
feeling that comedy and satire should be kept in their proper place,
like the moral standards and the social classes which they symbolize.
We begin to suspect that the literary value- judgements are pro-
jections of social ones. Why does Arnold want to rank poets? He
says that we increase our admiration for those who manage to stay
in Class One after we have made it very hard for them to do so.
This being clearly nonsense, we must look further. When we read
*‘m poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior ... is of
paramount importance . . . because of the high destinies of poetry/'
we begin to get a clue. We see that Arnold is trying to create a
new scriptural canon out of poetry to serve as a guide for those
social principles which he wants culture to take over from religion.
The treatment of criticism as the application of a social attitude
is a natural enough result of what we have called the power vacuum
in criticism. A systematic study alternates between inductive ex-
perience and deductive principles. In criticism rhetorical analysis
provides some of the induction, and poetics, the theory of criticism,
should be the deductive counterpart. There being no poetics, the
critic is thrown back on prejudice derived from his existence as a
social being. For prejudice is simply inadequate deduction, as a
prejudice in the mind can never be anything but a major premise
which is mostly submerged, like an iceberg.
It is not hard to see prejudice in Arnold, because his views have
dated: it is a little harder when ^'high seriousness" becomes '"ma-
turity," or some other powerful persuader of more recent critical
rhetoric. It is harder when the old question of what books one
would take to a desert island emerges from parlor games, where it
belongs, into an expensive library alleged to constitute the scrip-
tural canon of democratic values. Rhetorical value- judgements usu-
ally turn on questions of decorum, and the central conception of de-
corum is the difference between high, middle, and low styles. These
styles are suggested by the class structure of society, and criticism,
if it is not to reject half the facts of literary experience, obviously
has to look at art from the standpoint of an ideally classless society.
Arnold himself points this out when he says that “culture seeks
22
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
to do away with classes/’ Every deliberately constructed hierarchy
of values in literature known to me is based on a concealed social,
moral, or intellectual analogy. This applies whether the analogy is
conservative and Romantic, as it is in Arnold, or radical, giving the
top place to comedy, satire, and the values of prose and reason,
as it is in Bernard Shaw. The various pretexts for minimizing the
communicative power of certain writers, that they are obscure or
obscene or nihilistic or reactionary or what not, generally turn out
to be disguises for a feeling that the views of decorum held by the
ascendant social or intellectual class ought to be either maintained
or challenged. These social fixations keep changing, like a fan
turning in front of a light, and the changing inspires the belief
that posterity eventually discovers the whole truth about art.
A selective approach to tradition, then, invariably has some
ultra-critical joker concealed in it. There is no question of accept-
ing the whole of literature as the basis of study, but a tradition
(or, of course, ''the” tradition) is abstracted from it and attached
to contemporary social values, being then used to document those
values. The hesitant reader is invited to try the following exercise.
Pick three big names at random, work out the eight possible com-
binations of promotion and demotion (on a simplified, or two-
class, basis) and defend each in turn. Thus if the three names
picked were Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, the agenda would
run:
1. Demoting Shelley, on the ground that he is immature in
technique and profundity of thought compared to the others.
2. Demoting Milton, on the ground that his religious obscurant-
ism and heavy doctrinal content impair the spontaneity of his
utterance.
3. Demoting Shakespeare, on the ground that his detachment
from ideas makes his dramas a reflection of life rather than a
creative attempt to improve it.
4. Promoting Shakespeare, on the ground that he preserves an
integrity of poetic vision which in the others is obfuscated by
didacticism.
5. Promoting Milton, on the ground that his penetration of the
highest mysteries of faith raises him above Shakespeare’s unvary-
ing worldliness and Shelley’s callowness.
6. Promoting Shelley, on the ground that his love of freedom
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
speaks to the heart of modern man more immediately than poets
who accepted outworn social or religious values.
7. Promoting all three (for this a special style, which we may
call the peroration style, should be used).
8. Demoting all three, on the ground of the untidiness of Eng-
lish genius when examined by French or Classical or Chinese
standards.
The reader may sympathize with some of these ^ ^positions, as
they are called, more than with others, and so be seduced into
thinking that one of them must be right, and that it is important
to decide which one it is. But long before he has finished his assign-
ment he will realize that the whole procedure involved is an anxiety
neurosis prompted by a moral censor, and is totally devoid of
content. Of course, in addition to the moralists, there are poets who
regard only those other poets as authentic who sound like them-
selves; there are critics who enjoy making religious, anti-religious,
or political campaigns with toy soldiers labelled “Milton'' or
“Shelley" more than they enjoy studying poetry; there are stu-
dents who have urgent reasons for making as much edifying read-
ing as possible superfluous. But a conspiracy even of all these still
does not make criticism.
The social dialectics applied externally to criticism, then, are,
within criticism, pseudo-dialectics, or false rhetoric. It remains to
try to define the true dialectic of criticism. On this level the bio-
graphical critic becomes the historical critic. He develops from
hero-worship towards total and indiscriminate acceptance: there
is nothing “in his field" that he is not prepared to read with in-
terest. From a purely historical point of view, however, cultural phe-
nomena are to be read in their own context without contemporary
application. We study them as we do the stars, seeing their inter-
relationships but not approaching them. Hence historical criticism
needs to be complemented by a corresponding activity growing out
of tropical criticism.
We may call this ethical criticism, interpreting ethics not as a
rhetorical comparison of social facts to predetermined values, but
as the consciousness of the presence of society. As a critical category
this would be the sense of the real presence of culture in the com-
munity. Ethical criticism, then, deals with art as a communication
from the past to the present, and is based on the conception of the
total and simultaneous possession of past culture. An exclusive de-
^4
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
votion to it, ignoring historical criticism, would lead to a naive
translation of all cultural phenomena into our own terms without
regard to their original character. As a counterweight to historical
criticism, it is designed to express the contemporary impact of all
art, without selecting a tradition. Every new critical fashion has
increased the appreciation of some poets and depreciated others,
as the increase of interest in the metaphysical poets tended to de-
preciate the Romantics about twenty-five years ago. On the ethical
level we can see th at e very increase of appreciation TiSj^een rigH
^li d^very ^crease y ggng: that criticism has no business to react
against things, but should sh ow a steady advance" t oward undis-
eli minating catholicity. Oscar Wilde said that only an auctioneer
could be equally appreciative of all kinds of art: he had of course
the public critic in mind, but even the public critic's job of getting
the treasures of culture into the hands of the people who want
them is largely an auctioneer's job. And if this is true of him, it
is a fortiori true of the scholarly critic. ^
The dialectic axis of criticism, then, has as one pole the total
acceptance of the data of literature, and as the other the total
acceptance of the potential values of those data. This is the real
level of culture and of liberal education, the fertilizing of life by
learning, in which the systematic progress of scholarship flows into
a systematic progress of taste and understanding. On this level
there is no itch to make weighty judgements, and none of the ill
effects which follow the debauchery of judiciousness, and have
made the word critic a synonym for an educated shrew. Compara-
tive estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent
ones, from critical practice, not expressed principles guiding its
practice. The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is
a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than Blackmore.
But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he will want to
waste in belaboring the point. For belaboring the point is all he
can do: any criticism motivated by a desire to establish or prove it
will be merely one more document in the history of taste. There is
doubtless much in the culture of the past which will always be of
comparatively slight value to the present. But the difference be-
tween redeemable and irredeemable art, being based on the toted
experience of criticism, can never be theoretically formulated.
There are too many Cinderellas among the poets, too many ston^
^5
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
rejected from one fashionable building that have become heads
of the next corner.
There may, then, be such things as rules of critical procedure,
and laws, in the sense of the patterns of observed phenomena, of
literary practice. All efforts of critics to discover rules or laws in
the sense of moral mandates telling the artist what he ought to do,
or have done, to be an authentic artist, have failed. 'Toetry/' said
Shelley, “and the art which professes to regulate and limit its
powers, cannot subsist together.'^ There is no such art, and there
never has been. The substitution of subordination and value-judge-
ment for coordination and description, the substitution of “all
poets should” for “some poets do,” is only a sign that all the
relevant facts have not yet been considered Critical statements
with “must” or “should” in their predicates are either pedantries
or tautologies, depending on whether they are taken seriously or
not. Thus a dramatic critic may wish to say “all plays must have
unity of action.” If he is a pedant, he will then try to define unity
of action in specific terms. But creative power is versatile, and he
is sure to find himself sooner or later asserting that some perfectly
reputable dramatist, whose effectiveness on the stage has been
proved over and over again, does not exhibit the unity of action
he has defined, and is consequently not writing what he regards
as plays at all The critic who attempts to apply such principles in
a more liberal or more cautious spirit will soon have to broaden his
conceptions to the point, not of course of saying, but of trying to
conceal the fact that he is saying, “all plays that have unity of
action must have unity of action,” or, more simply and more com-
monly, “all good plays must be good plays.”
Criticism, in short, and aesthetics generally, must learn to do
what ethics has already done. There was a time when ethics could
take the simple form of comparing what man does with what he
ought to do, known as the good. The “good” invariably turned out
to be whatever the author of the book was accustomed to and
found sanctioned by his community. Ethical writers now, though
they still have values, tend to look at their problems rather dif-
ferently. But a procedure which is hopelessly outmoded in ethics is
still in vogue among writers on aesthetic problems. It is still possible
for a critic to define as authentic art whatever he happens to like,
and to go on to assert that what he happens not to like is, in terms
of that definition, not authentic art. The argument has the great
26
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
advantage of being irrefutable, as all circular arguments are, but it
is shadow and not substance.
The odious comparisons of greatness, then, may be left to take
care of themselves, for even when we f ee l obli ged to assent to them
they are still only unproductive platitudesfTheleal corice^rn of th^^
evaluating cfTEc is with posifiv e~\^1^ ^
h aps"1te~genum^^^ poem rather than with the greatness
SuchT criticism produces the direct value-judgement
of jnfor med good taste, the proving of art on the pulses , the dis-
cipli ned response of a highly organized nervouTsySSi to the im-
pact of^2Qg^t£^^ ^ c r itioiuLhis.sen$es would tr^tofb^tlOlsJnL
portance of this; nevertheless thejp^ a some caveats even here.
In the first place, it is superstition to believe that the swift intuitive
certainty of good taste is infallible. Good taste follows and is de-
veloped by the study of literature; its precision results from knowl-
edge, but does not produce knowledge. Hence the accuracy of any
critic's good taste is no guarantee that its inductive basis in literary
experience is adequate. This may still be true even after the critic
has learned to base his judgements on his experience of literature
and not on his social, moral, religious, or personal anxieties. Honest
critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste: they dis-
cover the possibility of recognizing a valid form of poetic experience
without being able to realize it for themselves^^,...-
In the second place, the positive value- judgment is founded on
a direct experience which is central to criticism yet forever ex-
cluded from it. Criticism can account for it only in critical terminol-
ogy, and that terminology can never recapture or include the
original experience. The original experience is like the direct vision
of color, or the direct sensation of heat or cold, that physics ''ex-
plains" in what, from the point of view of the experience itself,
is a quite irrelevant way. However disciplined by taste and skill,
the experience of literature is, like literature itself, unable to speak.
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off," said
Emily Dickinson, "I know this is poetry." This remark is perfectly
sound, but it relates only to criticism as experience. The reading
of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the
talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of
literature. Otherwise the reading will not be a genuine literary
experience, but a mere reflection of critical conventions, memories,
and prejudices. The presence of incommunicable experience in the
27
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
center of criticism will always keep criticism an art, as long as the
critic recognizes that criticism comes out of it but cannot be
built on it.
Thus, though the normal development of a critic's taste is toward
greater tolerance and catholicity, still criticism as knowledge is one
thing, and value-judgements informed by taste are another. The
attempt to bring the direct experience of literature into the struc-
ture of criticism produces the aberrations of the history of taste
already dealt with. The attempt to reverse the procedure and bring
criticism into direct experience will destroy the integrity of both.
Direct experience, even if it is concerned with something already
read hundreds of times, still tries to be a new and fresh experience
each time, which is clearly impossible if the poem itself has been
replaced by a critical view of the poem. To bring my own view
that criticism as knowledge should constantly progress and reject
nothing into direct experience would mean that the latter should
progress toward a general stupor of satisfaction with everything
written, which is not quite what I have in mind.
Finally, the skill developed from constant practice in the direct
experience of literature is a special skill, like playing the piano,
not the expression of a general attitude to life, like singing in the
shower. The critic has a subjective background of experience formed
by his temperament and by every contact with words he has made,
including newspapers, advertisements, conversations, movies, and
whatever he read at the age of nine. He has a specific skill in re-
sponding to literature which is no more like this subjective back-
ground, with all its private memories, associations, and arbitrary
prejudices, than reading a thermometer is like shivering. Again,
there is no one of critical ability who has not experienced intense
and profound pleasure from something simultaneously with a low
critical valuation of what produced it. There must be several dozen
critical and aesthetic theories based on the assumption that sub-
jective pleasure and the specific response to art are, or develop
from, or ultimately become, the same thing. Yet every cultivated
person who is not suffering from advanced paranoia knows that
they are constantly distinct. Or, again, the ideal value may be quite
different from the actual one. A critic may spend a thesis, a book,
or even a life work on something that he candidly admits to be
third-rate, simply because it is connected with something else
that he thinks sufficiently important for his pains. No critical
theory known to me takes any real account of the different systems
28
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
of valuation implied by one of the most common practices of
criticism.
Now that we have swept out our interpreter's parlor in the spirit
of the law, and raised the dust, we shall try it again with whatever
unguents of revelation we may possess. It should hardly be neces-
sary to point out that my polemic has been written in the first
person plural, and is quite as much a confession as a polemic. It is
clear, too, that a book of this kind can only be offered to a reader
who has enough sympathy with its aims to overlook, in the sense
not of ignoring but of seeing past, whatever strikes him as in-
adequate or simply wrong. I am convinced that if we wait for a
fully qualified critic to tackle the subjects of these essays, we shall
wait a long time. In order to keep the book within the bounds that
would make it possible to write and publish it, I have proceeded
deductively, and been rigorously selective in examples and illustra-
tions. The deductiveness does not extend further than tactical
method, and so far as I know there is no principle in the book which
is claimed as a perfect major premise, without exceptions or nega-
tive instances. Such expressions as "'normally," "usually,” "regu-
larly," or "as a rule" are thickly strewn throughout. An objection
of the- "what about so-and-so?" type may always be made by the
reader without necessarily destroying statements based on collective
observations, and there are many questions of the "where would
you put so-and-so?" type that cannot be answered by the present
writer.
Still, th e schematic natnm nf this book is deliberate, and is a
fea ture of it that I am unable, after long reflectio n, to"apoIogize for
There is a place for classification in criticism, as m any other disci-
p^me''^ich is^mofe'lnipoftan^^ an elegant_accomplishmeni
oTsome mandarin caste. ^gp-jstfong^jniS ^aL repu ^ fell
b y manyjentics^ to ^rd any form of schematization in poet igSuh
a ^in the result of ^ failure to"l3istinguish critici sm^as a body o i
knowledgCLi rom t fa^irect experience of lit erature^ wher^veiv act
k nTTiqjif^ , and nlag sificaob^as no place . vVhenever schematization
appears in the following pages, no importance is attached to the
schematic form itself, which may be only the result of my own
lack of ingenuity. Much of it, I expect, and in fact hope, may be
mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better
shape. The rest of it belongs to the systematic study of the formal
causes of art.
29
FIRST ESSAY
Historical Criticism; Theory of Modes
First Essay
HISTORICAL CRITICISM; THEORY OF MODES
FICTIONAL MODES: INTRODUCTION
In the second paragraph of the Poetics Aristotle speaks of the
differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different
elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the
characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others
on the same level. This passage has not received much attention
from modem critics, as the importance Aristotle assigns to good-
ness and badness seems to indicate a somewhat narrowly moralistic
view of literature. Aristotle's words for good and bad, however, are
spoudaios and phaulos, which have a figurative sense of weighty
and light. In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing
something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the
something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have
done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author
and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, there-
fore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of
action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.
Thus:
1. If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment
of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him
will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such
stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found
outside the normal literary categories.
2. If superior in degree to other men and to his environment,
the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvel-
lous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of
romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature
are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, un-
natural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking
animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous
power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance
have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly
so called, into legend, folk tale, mdrehen, and their literary affiliates
and derivatives.
3. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural en-
33
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
vironment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and
powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is
subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is
the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and
is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.
4. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the
hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity,
and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we
find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low
mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. *'High'' and
‘"low” have no connotations of comparative value, but are purely
diagrammatic, as they are when they refer to Biblical critics or
Anglicans. On this level the difficulty in retaining the word ''hero,''
which has a more limited meaning among the preceding modes,
occasionally strikes an author. Thackeray thus feels obliged to
call Vanity Fair a novel without a hero.
5. If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we
have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration,
or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true
when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation,
as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.
Looking over this table, we can see that European fiction, during
the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its center of gravity
down the list. In the pre-medieval period literature is closely at-
tached to Christian, late Classical, Celtic, or Teutonic myths. If
Christianity had not been both an imported myth and a devourer of
rival ones, this phase of Western literature would be easier to
isolate. In the form in which we possess it, most of it has already
moved into the category of romance. Romance divides into two main
forms: a secular form dealing with chivalry and knight-errantry, and
a religious form devoted to legends of saints. Both lean heavily on
miraculous violations of natural law for their interest as stories. Fic-
tions of romance dominate literature until the cult of the prince and
the courtier in the Renaissance brings the high mimetic mode into
the foreground. The characteristics of this mode are most clearly
seen in the genres of drama, particularly tragedy, and national epic.
Then a new kind of middle-class culture introduces the low mimetic,
which predominates in English literature from Defoe's time to
the end of the nineteenth century. In French literature it begins
and ends about fifty years earlier. During the last hundred years.
34
THEORY OF MODES
most serious fiction has tended increasingly to be ironic in mode.
Something of the same progression may be traced in Classical
literature too, in a greatly foreshortened form. Where a religion is
mythological and polytheistic, where there are promiscuous in-
carnations, deified heroes and kings of divine descent, where the
same adjective "'godlike” can be applied either to Zeus or to Achilles,
it is hardly possible to separate the mythical, romantic, and high
mimetic strands completely. Where the religion is theological, and
insists on a sharp division between divine and human natures,
romance becomes more clearly isolated, as it does in the legends
of Christian chivalry and sanctity, in the Arabian Nights of Mo-
hammedanism, in the stories of the judges and thaumaturgic proph-
ets of Israel. Similarly, the inability of the Classical world to shake
off the divine leader in its later period has much to do with the
abortive development of low mimetic and ironic modes that got
barely started with Roman satire. At the same time the establish-
ing of the high mimetic mode, the developing of a literary tradi-
tion with a consistent sense of an order of nature in it, is one of
the great feats of Greek civilization. Oriental fiction does not, so
far as I know, get very far away from mythical and romantic
formulas.
We shall here deal chiefly with the five epochs of Western lit-
erature, as given above, using Classical parallels only incidentally.
In each mode a distinction will be useful between naive and sophis-
ticated literature. The word naive I take from Schiller’s essay on
naive and sentimental poetry: I mean by it, however, primitive or
popular, whereas in Schiller it means something more like Classical.
The word sentimental also means something else in English, but
we do not have enough genuine critical terms to dispense with it.
In quotation marks, therefore, “sentimentar’ refers to a later re-
creation of an earlier mode. Thus Romanticism is a ""sentimental”
form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most part, a ""senti-
mental” form of folk tale. Also there is a general distinction be-
tween fictions in which the hero becomes isolated from his society,
and fictions in which he is incorporated into it. This distinction is
expressed by the words ""tragic” and ""comic” when they refer to
aspects of plot in general and not simply to forms of drama.
TRAGIC FICTIONAL MODES
Tragic stories, when they apply to divine beings, may be called
35
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
Dionysiac. These are stories of dying gods, like Hercules with his
poisoned shirt and his pyre, Orpheus torn to pieces by the Bac-
chantes, Balder murdered by the treachery of Loki, Christ dying
on the cross and marking with the words ''Why hast thou forsaken
me?’' a sense of his exclusion, as a divine being, from the society
of the Trinity.
The association of a god’s death with autumn or sunset does not,
in literature, necessarily mean that he is a god "of” vegetation or
the sun, but only that he is a god capable of dying, whatever his
department. But as a god is superior to nature as well as to other
men, the death of a god appropriately involves what Shakespeare,
in Venus and Adonis, calls the "solemn sympathy” of nature, the
word solemn having here some of its etymological connections with
ritual. Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy can hardly be a fallacy when a god
is the hero of the action, as when the poet of The Dream of the
Rood tells us that all creation wept at the death of Christ. Of course
there is never any real fallacy in making a purely imaginative align-
ment between man and nature, but the use of "solemn sympathy”
in a piece of more realistic fiction indicates that the author is
trying to give his hero some of the overtones of the mythical mode.
Ruskin’s example of a pathetic fallacy is "the cruel, crawling foam”
from Kingsley’s ballad about a girl drowned in the tide. But the
fact that the foam is so described gives to Kingsley’s Mary a faint
coloring of the myth of Andromeda.
The same associations with sunset and the fall of the leaf linger
in romance, where the hero is still half a god. In romance the sus-
pension of natural law and the individualizing of the hero’s ex-
ploits reduce nature largely to the animal and vegetable world.
Much of the hero’s life is spent with animals, or at any rate the
animals that are incurable romantics, such as horses, dogs, and
falcons, and the typical setting of romance is the forest. The hero’s
death or isolation thus has the effect of a spirit passing out of
nature, and evokes a mood best described as elegiac. The elegiac
presents a heroism unspoiled by irony. The inevitability in the
death of Beowulf, the treachery in the death of Roland, the malig-
nancy that compasses the death of the martyred saint, are of much
greater emotional importance than any ironic complications of
hybris and hamartia that may be involved. Hence the elegiac is
often accompanied by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the
passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new
56
THEORY OF MODES
one: one thinks of Beowulf looking, while he is dying, at the great
stone monuments of the eras of history that vanished before him.
In a very late ''sentimentaF' form the same mood is well caught in
Tennyson's Passing of Arthur.
Tragedy in the central or high mimetic sense, the fiction of the
fall of a leader (he has to fall because that is the only way in which
a leader can be isolated from his society), mingles the heroic with
the ironic. In elegiac romance the hero's mortality is primarily a
natural fact, the sign of his humanity; in high mimetic tragedy it
is also a social and moral fact. The tragic hero has to be of a properly
heroic size, but his fall is involved both with a sense of his relation
to society and with a sense of the supremacy of natural law, both
of which are ironic in reference. Tragedy belongs chiefly to the two
indigenous developments of tragic drama in fifth-century Athens
and seventeenth-century Europe from Shakespeare to Racine. Both
belong to a period of social history in which an aristocracy is fast
losing its effective power but still retains a good deal of ideological
prestige.
The central position of high mimetic tragedy in the five tragic
modes, balanced midway between godlike heroism and all-too-
human irony, is expressed in the traditional conception of catharsis.
The words pity and fear may be taken as referring to the two gen-
eral directions in which emotion moves, whether towards an ob-
ject or away from it. Naive romance, being closer to the wish-fulfil-
ment dream, tends to absorb emotion and communicate it internally
to the reader. Romance, therefore, is characterized by the accept-
ance of pity and fear, which in ordinary life relate to pain, as forms
of pleasure. It turns fear at a distance, or terror, into the adventur-
ous; fear at contact, or horror, into the marvellous, and fear without
an object, or dread (Angst) into a pensive melancholy. It turns pity
at a distance, or concern, into the theme of chivalrous rescue; pity
at contact, or tenderness, into a languid and relaxed charm, and
pity without an object (which has no name but is a kind of
animism, or treating everything in nature as though it had human
feelings) into creative fantasy. In sophisticated romance the char-
acteristics peculiar to the form are less obvious, especially in tragic
romance, where the theme of inevitable death works against the
marvellous, and often forces it into the background. In Romeo and
Juliet, for instance, the marvellous survives only in Mercutio's speech
on Queen Mab. But this play is marked as closer to romance than
37
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
the later tragedies by the softening influences that work in the
opposite direction from catharsis, draining off the irony, so to speak,
from the main characters.
In high mimetic tragedy pity and fear become, respectively,
favorable and adverse moral judgement, which are relevant to
tragedy but not central to it. We pity Desdemona and fear lago,
but the central tragic figure is Othello, and our feelings about him
are mixed. The particular thing called tragedy that happens to
the tragic hero does not depend on his moral status. If it is causally
related to something he has done, as it generally is, the tragedy is
in the inevitability of the consequences of the act, not in its moral
significance as an act. Hence the paradox that in tragedy pity and
fear are raised and cast out. Aristotle's hamartia or ^'flaw," there-
fore, is not necessarily wrongdoing, much less moral weakness: it
may be simply a matter of being a strong character in an exposed
position, like Cordelia. The exposed position is usually the place
of leadership, in which a character is exceptional and isolated at
the same time, giving us that curious blend of the inevitable and
the incongruous which is peculiar to tragedy. The principle of the
hamartia of leadership can be more clearly seen in naive high
mimetic tragedy, as we get it in The Mirror for Magistrates and
similar collections of tales based on the theme of the wheel of
fortune.
In low mimetic tragedy, pity and fear are neither purged nor
absorbed into pleasures, but are communicated externally, as sen-
sations. In fact the word “sensational" could have a more useful
meaning in criticism if it were not merely an adverse value-judge-
ment. The best word for low mimetic or domestic tragedy is,
perhaps, pathos, and pathos has a close relation to the sensational
reflex of tears. Pathos presents its hero as isolated by a weakness
which appeals to our sympathy because it is on our own level of
experience. I speak of a hero, but the central figure of pathos is often
a woman or a child (or both, as in the death-scenes of Little Eva
and Little Nell) , and we have a whole procession of pathetic female
sacrifices in English low mimetic fiction from Clarissa Harlowe
to Hardy's Tess and James's Daisy Miller. We notice that while
tragedy may massacre a whole cast, pathos is usually concentrated
on a single character, partly because low mimetic society is more
strongly individualized.
Again, in contrast to high mimetic tragedy, pathos is increased
38
THEORY OF MODES
by the inarticulateness of the victim. The death of an animal is
usually pathetic, and so is the catastrophe of defective intelligence
that is frequent in modern American literature. Wordsworth, who
as a low mimetic artist was one of our great masters of pathos, makes
his sailor's mother speak in a flat, dumpy, absurdly inadequate style
about her efforts to salvage her son's clothes and “other property"—
or did before bad criticism made him spoil his poem. Pathos is a
queer ghoulish emotion, and some failure of expression, real or
simulated, seems to be peculiar to it. It will always leave a fluently
plangent funeral elegy to go and batten on something like Swift's
memoir of Stella. Highly articulate pathos is apt to become a fac-
titious appeal to self-pity, or tear-jerking. The exploiting of fear in
the low mimetic is also sensational, and is a kind of pathos in
reverse. The terrible figure in this tradition, exemplified by Heath-
cliE, Simon Legree, and the villains of Dickens, is normally a
ruthless figure strongly contrasted with some kind of delicate virtue,
generally a helpless victim in his power.
The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our
own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence
the central tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the
isolated mind, the story of how someone recognizably like our-
selves is. broken by a conflict between the inner and outer world,
between imaginative reality and the sort of reality which is estab-
lished by a social consensus. Such tragedy may be concerned, as it
often is in Balzac, with a mania or obsession about rising in the
world, this being the central low mimetic counterpart of the fiction
of the fall of the leader. Or it may deal with the conflict of inner
and outer life, as in Madame Bovary and Lord Jim, or with the
impact of inflexible morality on experience, as in Melville's Pierre
and Ibsen's Brand. The type of character involved here we may
call by the Greek word alazon, which means impostor, someone
who pretends or tries to be something more than he is. The most
popular types of cdazon are the miles gloriosus and the learned
crank or obsessed philosopher.
We are most familiar with such characters in comedy, where
they are looked at from the outside, so that we see only the social
mask. But the dazon may be one aspect of the tragic hero as well:
the touch of miles gloriosus in Tamburlaine, even in Othello, is
unmistakable, as is the touch of the obsessed philosopher in Faustus
and Hamlet. It is very difficult to study a case of obsession, or even
39
FIRST essay: historical criticism
hypocrisy, from the inside, in a dramatic medium: even Tartuffe,
as far as his dramatic function is concerned, is a study of parasitism
rather than hypocrisy. The analysis of obsession belongs more
naturally to prose fiction or to a semi-dramatic medium like the
Browning monologue. For all the differences in technique and
attitude, Conrad's Lord Jim is a lineal descendant of the miles
glonosus, of the same family as Shaw's Sergius or Synge's playboy,
who are parallel types in a dramatic and comic setting. It is, of
course, quite possible to take the alazon at his own valuation: this
is done for instance by the creators of the inscrutable gloomy heroes
in Gothic thrillers, with their wild or piercing eyes and their dark
hints of interesting sins. The result as a rule is not tragedy so much
as the kind of melodrama which may be defined as comedy without
humor. When it rises out of this, we have a study of obsession
presented in terms of fear instead of pity: that is, the obsession
takes the form of an unconditioned will that drives its victim be-
yond the normal limits of humanity. One of the clearest examples
is Heathcliff, who plunges through death itself into vampirism;
but there are many others, ranging from Conrad's Kurtz to the
mad scientists of popular fiction.
The conception of irony meets us in Aristotle's Ethics, where
the eiron is the man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the
alazon. Such a man makes himself invulnerable, and, though
Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a pre-
destined artist, just as the alazon is one of his predestined victims.
The term irony, then, indicates a technique of appearing to be less
than one is, which in literature becomes most commonly a tech-
nique of saying as little and meaning as much as possible, or, in a
more general way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct
statement or its own obvious meaning. (lam not using the word
ironic itself in any unfamiliar sense, though I am exploring some
of its implications.)
The ironic fiction-writer, then, deprecates himself and, like
Socrates, pretends to know nothing, even that he is ironic. Com-
plete objectivity and suppression of all explicit moral judgements
are essential to his method. Thus pity and fear are not raised in
ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art. When we
try to isolate the ironic as such, we find that it seems to be simply
the attitude of the poet as such, a dispassionate construction of a
literary form, with all assertive elements, implied or expressed,
40
THEORY OF MODES
eliminated. Irony, as a mode, is bom from the low mimetic; it
takes life exactly as it finds it But the ironist fables without moral-
izing, and has no object but his subject. Irony is naturally a sophisti-
cated mode, and the chief difference between sophisticated and
naive irony is that the naive ironist calls attention to the fact that
he is being ironic, whereas sophisticated irony merely states, and
lets the reader add the ironic tone himself. Coleridge, noting an
ironic comment in Defoe, points out how Defoe's subtlety could
be made crude and obvious simply by over-punctuating the same
words with italics, dashes, exclamation points, and other signs of
being oneself aware of irony.
Tragic irony, then, becomes simply the study of tragic isolation
as such, and it thereby drops out the element of the special case,
which in some degree is in all the other modes. Its hero does not
necessarily have any tragic hamartia or pathetic obsession: he is
only somebody who gets isolated from his society. Thus the central
principle of tragic irony is that whatever exceptional happens to
the hero should be causally out of line with his character. Tragedy
is intelligible, not in the sense of having any pat moral to go with
it, but in the sense that Aristotle had in mind when he spoke of
discovery or recognition as essential to the tragic plot. Tragedy is
intelligible because its catastrophe is plausibly related to its situa-
tion. Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrari-
ness, of the victim's having been unlucky, selected at random or
by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone
else would be. If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe,
it is an inadequate reason, and raises more objections than it
answers.
Thus the figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize
in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this
typical victim the pharmakos or scapegoat. We meet a pharmakos
figure in Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, in Melville's Billy Budd, in
Hardy's Tess, in the Septimus of Mrs. Dalloway^ in stories of per-
secuted Jews and Negroes, in stories of artists whose genius makes
them Ishmaels of a bourgeois society. The pharmakos is neither
innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens
to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes, like the
mountaineer whose shout brings down an avalanche. He is guilty
in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a
world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence.
41
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
The two facts do not come together; they remain ironically apart.
The pharmakos, in short, is in the situation of Job. Job can defend
himself against the charge of having done something that makes
his catastrophe morally intelligible; but the success of his defense
makes it morally unintelligible.
Thus the incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined
in tragedy, separate into opposite poles of irony. At one pole is the
inevitable irony of human life. What happens to, say, the hero of
Kafka's Trial is not the result of what he has done, but the end
of what he is, which is an “all too human" being. The archetype
of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence
of death. At the other pole is the incongruous irony of human life,
in which all attempts to transfer guilt to a victim give that victim
something of the dignity of innocence. The archetype of the in-
congruously ironic is Christ, the perfectly innocent victim excluded
from human society. Halfway between is the central figure of
tragedy, who is human and yet of a heroic si2:e which often has in
it the suggestion of divinity. His archetype is Prometheus, the
immortal titan rejected by the gods for befriending men. Tie Book
of Job is not a tragedy of the Promethean type, but a tragic irony
in which the dialectic of the divine and the human nature works
itself out. By justifying himself as a victim of God, Job tries to make
himself into a tragic Promethean figure, but he does not succeed.
These references may help to explain something that might
otherwise be a puzzling fact about modern literature. Irony descends
from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate ob-
servation. But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, and
dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear
in it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle. This reap-
pearance of myth in the ironic is particularly clear in Kafka and in
Joyce. In Kafka, whose work, from one point of view, may be said
to form a series of commentaries on the Book of Job, the common
contemporary types of tragic irony, the Jew, the artist, Everyman,
and a kind of sombre Chaplin clown, are all found, and most of
these elements are combined, in a comic form, in Joyce's Shem.
However, ironic myth is frequent enough elsewhere, and many
features of ironic literature are unintelligible without it. Henry
James learned his trade mainly from the realists and naturalists of
the nineteenth century, but if we were to judge, for example, the
story called The Altar of the Dead purely by low mimetic standards,
42
THEORY OF MODES
we should have to call it a tissue of improbable coincidence, in-
adequate motivation, and inconclusive resolution. When we look
at it as ironic myth, a story of how the god of one person is the
pharmakos of another, its structure becomes simple and logical.
COMIC FICTIONAL MODES
The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which
usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it.
The mythical comedy corresponding to the death of the Dionysiac
god is Apollonian, the story of how a hero is accepted by a society
of gods. In Classical literature the theme of acceptance forms part
of the stories of Hercules, Mercury, and other deities who had a
probation to go through, and in Christian literature it is the theme
of salvation, or, in a more concentrated form, of assumption: the
comedy that stands just at the end of Dante's Commedia. The
mode of romantic comedy corresponding to the elegiac is best de-
scribed as idyllic, and its chief vehicle is the pastoral. Because of
the social interest of comedy, the idyllic cannot equal the intro-
version of the elegiac, but it preserves the theme of escape from
society to the extent of idealizing a simplified life in the country
or on the frontier (the pastoral of popular modern literature is the
Western story). The close association with animal and vegetable
nature that we noted in the elegiac recurs in the sheep and pleasant
pastures (or the cattle and ranches) of the idyllic, and the same
easy connection with myth recurs in the fact that such imagery is
often used, as it is in the Bible, for the theme of salvation.
The clearest example of high mimetic comedy is the Old Comedy
of Aristophanes. The New Comedy of Menander is closer to the
low mimetic, and through Plautus and Terence its formulas were
handed down to the Renaissance, so that there has always been a
strongly low mimetic bias to social comedy. In Aristophanes there
is usually a central figure who constructs his (or her) own society
in the teeth of strong opposition, driving off one after another all
the people who come to prevent or exploit him, and eventually
achieving a heroic triumph, complete with mistresses, in which he
is sometimes assigned the honors of a reborn god. We notice that
just as there is a catharsis of pity and fear in tragedy, so there is a
catharsis of the corresponding comic emotions, which are sympathy
and ridicule, in Old Comedy. The comic hero will get his triumph
whether what he has done is sensible or silly, honest or rascally.
43
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
Thus Old Comedy, like the tragedy contemporary with it, is a blend
of the heroic and the ironic. In some plays this fact is partly con-
cealed by Aristophanes' strong desire to get his own opinion of what
the hero is doing into the record, but his greatest comedy, The
Birds, preserves an exquisite balance between comic heroism and
comic irony.
New Comedy normally presents an erotic intrigue between a
young man and a young woman which is blocked by some kind of
opposition, usually paternal, and resolved by a twist in the plot
which is the comic form of Aristotle's “discovery," and is more
manipulated than its tragic counterpart. At the beginning of the
play the forces thwarting the hero are in control of the play's so-
ciety, but after a discovery in which the hero becomes wealthy or
the heroine respectable, a new society crystallizes on the stage
around the hero and his bride. The action of the comedy thus
moves towards the incorporation of the hero into the society that
he naturally fits. The hero himself is seldom a very interesting
person: in conformity with low mimetic decorum, he is ordinary
in his virtues, but socially attractive. In Shakespeare and in the
kind of romantic comedy that most closely resembles his there is a
development of these formulas in a more distinctively high mimetic
direction. In the figure of Prospero we have one of the few ap-
proaches to the Aristophanic technique of having the whole comic
action projected by a central character. Usually Shakespeare achieves
his high mimetic pattern by making the struggle of the repressive
and the desirable societies a struggle between two levels of existence,
the former like our own world or worse, the latter enchanted and
idyllic. This point will be dealt with more fully later.
For the reasons given above the domestic comedy of later fiction
carries on with much the same conventions as were used in the
Renaissance. Domestic comedy is usually based on the Cinderella
archetype, the kind of thing that happens when Pamela's virtue is
rewarded, the incorporation of an individual very like the reader
into the society aspired to by both, a society ushered in with a
happy rustle of bridal gowns and banknotes. Here again, Shake-
spearean comedy may marry off eight or ten people of approxi-
mately equal dramatic interest, just as a high mimetic tragedy may
kill the same number, but in domestic comedy such diffusion of
sexual energy is more rare. The chief difference between high and
low mimetic comedy, however, is that the resolution of the latter
44
THEORY OF MODES
more frequently involves a social promotion. More sophisticated
writers of low mimetic comedy often present the same success-
story formula with the moral ambiguities that we have found in
Aristophanes. In Balzac or Stendhal a clever and ruthless scoun-
drel may achieve the same kind of success as the virtuous heroes
of Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger. Thus the comic counterpart
of the dazon seems to be the clever, likeable, unprincipled picaw
of the picaresque novel.
In studying ironic comedy we must start with the theme of
driving out the pharmakos from the point of view of society. This
appeals to the kind of relief we are expected to feel when we see
Jonson's Volpone condemned to the galleys, Shylock stripped of
his wealth, or Tartuffe taken off to prison. Such a theme, unless
touched very lightly, is difficult to make convincing, for the reasons
suggested in connection with ironic tragedy. Insisting on the theme
of social revenge on an individual, however great a rascal he may be,
tends to make him look less involved in guilt and the society more
so. This is particularly true of characters who have been trying to
amuse either the actual or the internal audience, and who are the
comic counterparts of the tragic hero as artist. The rejection of the
entertainer, whether fool, clown, buffoon, or simpleton, can be one
of the most terrible ironies known to art, as the rejection of Falstaff
shows, and certain scenes in Chaplin.
In some religious poetry, for example at the end of the Paradiso,
we can see that literature has an upper limit, a point at which an
imaginative vision of an eternal world becomes an experience of it.
In ironic comedy we begin to see that art has also a lower limit
in actual life. This is the condition of savagery, the world in which
comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim, and tragedy
in enduring it. Ironic comedy brings us to the figure of the scape-
goat ritual and the nightmare dream, the human symbol that con-
centrates our fears and hates. We pass the boundary of art when
this symbol becomes existential, as it does in the black man of a
lynching, the Jew of a pogrom, the old woman of a witch hunt, or
anyone picked up at random by a mob, like Cinna the poet in
Julius Caesar, In Aristophanes the irony sometimes edges very close
to mob violence because the attacks are personal: one thinks of
all the easy laughs he gets, in play after play, at the pederasty of
Cleisthenes or the cowardice of Cleonymus. In Aristophanes the
word pharmakos means simply scoundrel, with no nonsense about
4S
FIRST ESSAY; HISTORICAL CRITICISM
it. At the conclusion of The Clouds, where the poet seems almost
to be summoning a lynching party to go and burn down Socrates'
house, we reach the comic counterpart of one of the greatest
masterpieces of tragic irony in literature, Plato's Apology.
But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from
savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important
theme of ironic comedy. Even in laughter itself some kind of
deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be
very important. We notice this particularly in all forms of art in
which a large number of auditors are simultaneously present, as
in drama, and, still more obviously, in games. We notice too that
playing at sacrifice has nothing to do with any historical descent
from sacrificial ritual, such as has been suggested for Old Comedy.
All the features of such ritual, the king's son, the mimic death, the
executioner, the substituted victim, are far more explicit in Gilbert
and Sullivan's Mikado than they are in Aristophanes. There is cer-
tainly no evidence that baseball has descended from a ritual of
human sacrifice, but the umpire is quite as much of a pharmakos
as if it had: he is an abandoned scoundrel, a greater robber than
Barabbas; he has the evil eye; the supporters of the losing team
scream for his death. At play, mob emotions are boiled in an open
pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace
of what Blake would call moral virtue. The gladiatorial combat,
in which the audience has the actual power of life and death over
the people who are entertaining them, is perhaps the most con-
centrated of all the savage or demonic parodies of drama.
The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely
accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of
how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid of him. The
detective story begins in the Sherlock Holmes period as an intensi-
fication of low mimetic, in the sharpening of attention to details
that makes the dullest and most neglected trivia of daily living
leap into mysterious and fateful significance. But as we move
further away from this we move toward a ritual drama around a
corpse in which a wavering finger of social condemnation passes
over a group of ''suspects" and finally settles on one. The sense of
a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is
only plausibly manipulated. If it were really inevitable, we should
have tragic irony, as in Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikoff^s
crime is so interwoven with his character that there can be no ques-
46
THEORY OF MODES
tion of any ''whodunit'' mystery. In the growing brutality of the
crime story (a brutality protected by the convention of the form,
as it is conventionally impossible that the man-hunter can be
mistaken in believing that one of his suspects is a murderer), de-
tection begins to merge with the thriller as one of the forms of
melodrama. In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph
of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the
moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melo-
drama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally
possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the
lynching mob.
We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the
detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the
police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob
violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not
to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. Serious
melodrama soon gets entangled with its own pity and fear: the
more serious it is, the more likely it is to be looked at ironically
by the reader, its pity and fear seen as sentimental drivel and owlish
solemnity, respectively. One pole of ironic comedy is the recogni-
tion of the absurdity of naive melodrama, or, at least, of the ab-
surdity of its attempt to define the enemy of society as a person
outside that society. From there it develops toward the opposite
pole, which is true comic irony or satire, and which defines the
enemy of society as a spirit within that society. Let us arrange the
forms of ironic comedy from this point of view.
Cultivated people go to a melodrama to hiss the villain with an
air of condescension: they are making a point of the fact that they
cannot take his villainy seriously. We have here a type of irony
which exactly corresponds to that of two other major arts of the
ironic age, advertising and propaganda. These arts pretend to ad-
dress themselves seriously to a subliminal audience of cretins, an
audience that may not even exist, but which is assumed to be
simple-minded enough to accept at their face value the statements
made about the purity of a soap or a government's motives. The
rest of us, realizing that irony never says precisely what it means,
take these arts ironically, or, at least, regard them as a kind of
ironic game. Similarly, we read murder stories with a strong sense
of the unreality of the villainy involved. Murder is doubtless a
serious crime, but if private murder really were a major threat to
47
FIRST essay: historical criticism
our civilization it would not be relaxing to read about it. We may
compare the abuse showered on the pimp in Roman comedy, which
was similarly based on the indisputable ground that brothels are
immoral.
The next step is an ironic comedy addressed to the people who
can realize that murderous violence is less an attack on a virtuous
society by a malignant individual than a symptom of that society's
own viciousness. Such a comedy would be the kind of intellectual-
ized parody of melodramatic formulas represented by, for instance,
the novels of Graham Greene. Next comes the ironic comedy
directed at the melodramatic spirit itself, an astonishingly per-
sistent tradition in all comedy in which there is a large ironic
admixture. One notes a recurring tendency on the part of ironic
comedy to ridicule and scold an audience assumed to be hankering
after sentiment, solemnity, and the triumph of fidelity and ap-
proved moral standards. The arrogance of Jonson and Congreve,
the mocking of bourgeois sentiment in Goldsmith, the parody of
melodramatic situations in Wilde and Shaw, belong to a consistent
tradition. Moliere had to please his king, but was not tempera-
mentally an exception. To comic drama one may add the ridicule
of melodramatic romance in the novelists, from Fielding to Joyce.
Finally comes the comedy of manners, the portrayal of a chat-
tering-monkey society devoted to snobbery and slander. In this
kind of irony the characters who are opposed to or excluded from
the fictional society have the sympathy of the audience. Here we
are close to a parody of tragic irony, as we can see in the appalling
fate of the relatively harmless hero of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful
of Dust. Or we may have a character who, with the sympathy of
the author or audience, repudiates such a society to the point of
deliberately walking out of it, becoming thereby a kind of phar-
makos in reverse. This happens for instance at the conclusion of
Aldous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves. It is more usual, however,
for the artist to present an ironic deadlock in which the hero is
regarded as a fool or worse by the fictional society, and yet impresses
the real audience as having something more valuable than his
society has. The obvious example, and certainly one of the greatest,
is Dostoievsky's The Idiot, but there are many others. The Good
Soldier Schweik, Heaven's My Destination and The Horse's Mouth
are instances that will give some idea of the range of the theme.
What we have said about the return of irony to myth in tragic
48
THEORY OF MODES
modes thus holds equally well for comic ones. Even popular litera-
ture appears to be slowly shifting its center of gravity from murder
stories to science fiction— or at any rate a rapid growth of science
fiction is certainly a fact about contemporary popular literature.
Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like
on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is
often of a kind that appears to us as technologically miraculous.
It is thus a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to
myth.
The conception of a sequence of fictional modes should do
something, let us hope, to give a more flexible meaning to some of
our literary terms. The words ^'romantic'’ and '"realistic,” for in-
stance, as ordinarily used, are relative or comparative terms: they
illustrate tendencies in fiction, and cannot be used as simply de-
scriptive adjectives with any sort of exactness. If we take the se-
quence De Raptu ProserpinaCy The Man of Law's Tale, Much
Ado About Nothings Pride and Prejudice, An American Tragedy,
it is clear that each work is "romantic” compared to its successors
and "realistic” compared to its predecessors. On the other hand,
the term "naturalism” shows up in its proper perspective as a
phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a
very different way, begins as an intensification of low mimetic, an
attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic
of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola's obsession with ironic
formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the
human scene.
The difference between the ironic tone that we may find in low
mimetic or earlier modes and the ironic structure of the ironic
mode itself is not hard to sense in practice. When Dickens, for
instance, uses irony the reader is invited to share in the irony,
because certain standards of normality common to author and
reader are assumed. Such assumptions are a mark of a relatively
popular mode: as the example of Dickens indicates, the gap be-
tween serious and popular fiction is narrower in low mimetic than
in ironic writing. The literary acceptance of relatively stable social
norms is closely connected with the reticence of low mimetic as
compared to ironic fiction. In low mimetic modes characters are
usually presented as they appear to others, fully dressed and with
a large section of both their physical lives and their inner mono-
49
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
logue carefully excised. Such an approach is entirely consistent
with the other conventions involved.
If we were to make this distinction the basis of a comparative
value- judgement, which would, of course, be a moral value-judge-
ment disguised as a critical one, we should be compelled either to
attack low mimetic conventions for being prudish and hypocritical
and leaving too much of life out, or to attack ironic conventions
for not being wholesome, healthy, popular, reassuring, and sound,
like the conventions of Dickens. As long as we are concerned simply
to distinguish between the conventions, we need only remark that
the low mimetic is one step more heroic than the ironic, and that
low mimetic reticence has the effect of making its characters, on
the average, more heroic, or at least more dignified, than the char-
acters in ironic fiction.
We may also apply our scheme to the principles of selection on
which a writer of fiction operates. Let us take, as a random example,
the use of ghosts in fiction. In a true myth there can obviously be
no consistent distinction between ghosts and living beings. In
romance we have real human beings, and consequently ghosts are
in a separate category, but in a romance a ghost as a rule is merely
one more character: he causes little surprise because his appearance
is no more marvellous than many other events. In high mimetic,
where we are within the order of nature, a ghost is relatively easy
to introduce because the plane of experience is above our own, but
when he appears he is an awful and mysterious being from what
is perceptibly another world. In low mimetic, ghosts have been,
ever since Defoe, almost entirely confined to a separate category
of “ghost stories.'" In ordinary low mimetic fiction they are inad-
missible, “in complaisance to the scepticism of a reader," as Field-
ing puts it, a skepticism which extends only to low mimetic con-
ventions. The few exceptions, such as Wuthering Heights, go a
long way to prove the rule—that is, we recognize a strong influence
of romance in 'Wuthering Heights. In some forms of ironic fiction,
such as the later works of Henry James, the ghost begins to come
back as a fragment of a disintegrating personality.
Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we
must then learn to recombine them. For while one mode consti-
tutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the
other four may be simultaneously present. Much of our sense of
the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counter-
50
THEORY OF MODES
point Chaucer is a medieval poet specializing mainly in romance,
whether sacred or secular. Of his pilgrims, the knight and the
parson clearly present the norms of the society m which he func-
tions as a poet, and, as we have them, the Canterbury Tales are
contained by these two figures, who open and close the series. But
to overlook Chaucer’s mastery of low mimetic and ironic techniques
would be as wrong as to think of him as a modern novelist who
got into the Middle Ages by mistake. The tonality of Antony and
Cleopatra is high mimetic, the story of the fall of a great leader.
But it is easy to look at Mark Antony ironically, as a man enslaved
by passion; it is easy to recognize his common humanity with our-
selves; it is easy to see in him a romantic adventurer of prodigious
courage and endurance betrayed by a witch; there are even hints
of a superhuman being whose legs bestrid the ocean and whose
downfall is a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer. To
leave out any of these would oversimplify and belittle the play.
Through such an analysis we may come to realize that the two
essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its
own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed
but complementary facts.
Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the
mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and ac-
curacy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other
pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle’s
word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a
tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters
who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward
a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story. Myths of gods merge
into legends of heroes; legends of heroes merge into plots of
tragedies and comedies; plots of tragedies and comedies merge into
plots of more or less realistic fiction. But these are change of social
context rather than of literary form, and the constructive prin-
ciples of story-telling remain constant through them, though of
course they adapt to them. Tom Jones and Oliver Twist are typical
enough as low mimetic characters, but the birth-mystery plots in
which they are involved are plausible adaptations of fictional for-
mulas that go back to Menander, and from Menander to Euripides’
Ion, and from Euripides to legends like those of Perseus and
Moses. We note in passing that imitation of nature m fiction pro-
duces, not truth or reality, but plausibility, and plausibility varies
5^
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
in weight from a mere perfunctory concession in a myth or folk
tale to a kind of censor principle in a naturalistic novel. Reading
forward in history, therefore, we may think of our romantic, high
mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths,
mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the
opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, beginning
to move back.
THEMATIC MODES
Aristotle lists six aspects of poetry: three of them, melody, dic-
tion, and spectacle, form a group by themselves, and we shall con-
sider them in due course. The other three are mythos or plot,
ethos, which includes both characters and setting, and dianoia or
'Thought.” The literary works we have so far been considering are
works of fiction in which the plot is, as Aristotle called it, the
"soul” or shaping principle, and the characters exist primarily as
functions of the plot. But besides the internal fiction of the hero
and his society, there is an external fiction which is a relation be-
tween the writer and the writer's society. Poetry may be as com-
pletely absorbed in its internal characters as it is in Shakespeare,
or in Homer, where the poet himself simply points to his story
and disappears, the second word of the Odyssey, moi, being all we
get of him in that poem. But as soon as the poet's personality ap-
pears on the horizon, a relation with the reader is established
which cuts across the story, and which may increase until there
is no story at all apart from what the poet is conveying to his
reader.
In such genres as novels and plays the internal fiction is usually
of primary interest; in essays and in lyrics the primary interest is in
dianoia, the idea or poetic thought (something quite different, of
course, from other kinds of thought) that the reader gets from the
writer. The best translation of dianoia is, perhaps, "theme,” and
literature with this ideal or conceptual interest may be called
thematic. When a reader of a novel asks, "How is this story going
to turn out?” he is asking a question about the plot, specifically
about that crucial aspect of the plot which Aristotle calls discovery
or anagnorisis. But he is equally likely to ask, "Wbat's the point
of this story?” This question relates to dianoia, and indicates that
themes have their elements of discovery just as plots do.
It is easy to say that some literary works are fictional and others
5 ^
THEORY OF MODES
thematic in their main emphasis. But clearly there is no such thing
as d fictional or a thematic work of literature, for all four ethical
elements (ethical in the sense of relating to character), the hero,
the hero's society, the poet and the poet's readers, are always at
least potentially present. There can hardly be a work of literature
without some kind of relation, implied or expressed, between its
creator and its auditors. When the audience the poet had in mind
is superseded by posterity, the relation changes, but it still holds.
On the other hand, even in lyrics and essays the writer is to some
extent a fictional hero with a fictional audience, for if the element
of fictional projection disappeared completely, the writing would
become direct address, or straight discursive wxiting, and cease to
be literature. A poet sending a love poem to his lady complaining
of her cruelty has stereoscoped his four ethical elements into two,
but the four are still there.
Hence every work of literature has both a fictional and a thematic
aspect, and the question of which is more important is often simply
a matter of opinion or emphasis in interpretation. We have cited
Homer as the very type of impersonal fiction writer, but the main
emphasis of Homeric criticism, down to about 1750 at least, has
been overwhelmingly thematic, concerned with the dianoia or ideal
of leadership implicit in the two epics. The History of Tom Jones,
a Foundling, is a novel named after its plot; Sense and Sensibility
is named after its theme. But Fielding has as strong a thematic
interest (revealed chiefly in the introductory chapters to the dif-
ferent books) as Jane Austen has in telling a good story. Both
novels are strongly fictional in emphasis compared to Uncle Tom's
Cabin or The Grapes of Wrath, where the plot exists primarily to
illustrate the themes of slavery and migratory labor respectively.
They in their turn are fictional in emphasis compared to The
Pilgrim's Progress, and The Pilgrim's Progress is fictional in em-
phasis compared to an essay of Montaigne. We note that as we
move from fictional to thematic emphasis, the element represented
by the term mythos tends to mean increasingly ‘"narrative" rather
than “plot."
When a work of fiction is written or interpreted thematically,
it becomes a parable or illustrative fable. All formal allegories have,
ipso facto, a strong thematic interest, though it does not follow, as
is often said, that any thematic criticism of a work of fiction will
turn it into an allegory (though it may and does allegorize, as we
53
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
shall see). Genuine allegory is a structural element in literature: it
has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation
alone.
Again, nearly every civilization has, in its stock of traditional
myths, a particular group which is thought of as more serious,
more authoritative, more educational and closer to fact and truth
than the rest. For most poets of the Christian era who have used
both the Bible and Classical literature, the latter has not stood
on the same plane of authority as the former, although they are
equally mythological as far as literary criticism is concerned. This
distinction of canonical and apocryphal myth, which can be found
even in primitive societies, gives to the former group a particular
thematic importance.
We have now to see how our sequence of modes works out in
the thematic aspect of literature. We shall have to confine our-
selves here more strictly to Western literature, as the foreshorten-
ing process that we noticed in Classical fiction is even more marked
on the thematic side.
In fiction, we discovered two main tendencies, a ‘'comic'' tend-
ency to integrate the hero with his society, and a “tragic" tendency
to isolate him. In thematic literature the poet may write as an
individual, emphasizing the separateness of his personality and the
distinctness of his vision. This attitude produces most lyrics and
essays, a good deal of satire, epigrams, and the writing of “eclogues"
or occasional pieces generally. The frequency of the moods of
protest, complaint, ridicule, and loneliness (whether bitter or
serene) in such works may perhaps indicate a rough analogy to the
tragic modes of fiction. Or the poet may devote himself to being
a spokesman of his society, which means, as he is not addressing
a second society, that a poetic knowledge and expressive power
which is latent or needed in his society comes to articulation in him.
Such an attitude produces poetry which is educational in the
broadest sense: epics of the more artificial or thematic kind, didactic
poetry and prose, encyclopaedic compilations of myth, folklore,
and legend like those of Ovid and Snorri, where, though the stories
themselves are fictional, the arrangement of them and the motive
for collecting them is thematic. In poetry which is educational in
this sense, the social function of the poet figures prominently as a
theme. If we call the poetry of the isolated individual a “lyric"
and the poetry of the social spokesman an “epic" tendency (in
54
THEORY OF MODES
comparison to the more “dramatic” fictions of internal characters)
we shall perhaps gain some preliminary conception of them. But it
is obvious that we are not here using these terms in any generic
sense, and as they certainly should be used in a generic sense, we
shall drop them at once and substitute “episodic” and “encyclo-
paedic” instead. That is, when the poet communicates as an indi-
vidual, his forms tend to be discontinuous; when he communicates
as a professional man with a social function, he tends to seek more
extended patterns.
On the mythical plane there is more legend than evidence,
but it is clear that the poet who sings about gods is often con-
sidered to be singing as one, or as an instrument of one. His
social function is that of an inspired oracle; he is frequently an
ecstatic, and we hear strange stories of his powers. Orpheus
could draw trees after him; the bards and ollaves of the Celtic
world could kill their enemies with their satire; the prophets of
Israel foretold the future. The poet's visionary function, his
proper work as a poet, is on this plane to reveal the god for
whom he speaks. This usually means that he reveals the god's
will in connection with a specific occasion, when he is consulted
as an oracle in a state of “enthusiasm”* or divine possession. But
in time the god in him reveals his nature and history as well
as his will, and so a larger pattern of myth and ritual is built
up out of a series of oracular pronouncements. We can see this
very clearly in the emergence of the Messiah myth from the
oracles of the Hebrew prophets. The Koran is one clear historical
instance at the beginning of the Western period of the mythical
mode in action. Authentic examples of oracular poetry are so
largely pre- and extra-literary that they are difficult to isolate.
For more recent examples, such as the ecstatic oracles which are
said to be an important aspect of the culture of the Plains In-
dians, we have to depend on anthropologists.
Two principles of some importance are already implicit in
our argument. One is a conception of a total body of vision that
poets as a whole class are entrusted with, a total body tending
to incorporate itself in a single encyclopaedic form, which can
be attempted by one poet if he is sufficiently learned or inspired,
or by a poetic school or tradition if the culture is sufficiently
homogeneous. We note that traditional tales and myths and
histories have a strong tendency to stick together and form en-
55
FIRST essay: historical CRITICISM
c^yclopaedic aggregates, especially when they are in a conventional
metre, as they usually are. Some such process as this has been
postulated for the Homeric epics, and in the Prose Edda the
themes of the fragmentary lays of the Elder Edda are organized
into a connected prose sequence. The Biblical histories obviously
developed in a similar way, and in India, where the process of
transmission was more relaxed, the two traditional epics, the
Mahabharata and the Ramayana, apparently went on distending
themselves for centuries, like pythons swallowing sheep. The
expansion of The Romaunt of the Rose into an encyclopaedic
satire by a second author is a medieval example. In the Finnish
Kclevdla everything that is unified or continuous about the
poem is a nineteenth-century reconstruction. It does not follow
that the Kdevda, considered as a single epic, is a fake: on the
contrary, what follows is that the material of the Kdevda is the
sort of material that lends itself readily to such reconstruction.
In the mythical mode the encyclopaedic form is the sacred
scripture, and in the other modes we should expect to find en-
cyclopaedic forms which constitute a series of increasingly human
andogies of mythical or scriptural revelation.
The other principle is that while there may be a great variety
of episodic forms in any mode, in each mode we may attach a
special significance to the particular episodic form that seems to
be the germ out of which the encyclopaedic forms develop. In
the mythical mode this central or typical episodic product is the
oracle. The oracle develops a number of subsidiary forms, notably
the commandment, the parable, the aphorism, and the prophecy.
Out of these, whether strung loosely together as they are in the
Koran or carefully edited and arranged as they are in the Bible,
the scripture or sacred book takes shape. The Book of Isaiah,
for example, can be analyzed into a mass of separate oracles,
with three major foci, so to speak, one mainly pre-exilic, one
exilic and one post-exilic. The ''higher critics” of the Bible are
not literary critics, and we have to make the suggestion our-
selves that the Book of Isaiah is in fact the unity it has always
been traditionally taken to be, a unity not of authorship but of
theme, and that theme in epitome the theme of the Bible as a
whole, as the parable of Israel lost, captive, and redeemed.
In the perM of romance, the poet, like the corresponding
hero, has become a human being, and the god has retreated to
56
THEORY OF MODES
the sky. His function now is primarily to remember. Memory,
said Greek myth at the beginning of its historical period, is the
mother of the Muses, who inspire the poets, but no longer in
the same degree that the god inspires the oracle—though the
poets clung to the connection as long as they could. In Homer,
in the perhaps more primitive Hesiod, in the poets of the heroic
age of the North, we can see the kind of thing the poet had to
remember. Lists of kings and foreign tribes, myths and genealo-
gies of gods, historical traditions, the proverbs of popular wisdom,
taboos, lucky and unlucky days, charms, the deeds of the tribal
heroes, were some of the things that came out when the poet
unlocked his word-hoard. The medieval minstrel with his reper-
tory of memorized stories and the clerical poet who, like Gower
or the author of the Cursor Mundi, tries to get everything he
knows into one vast poem or poetic testament, belong in the
same category. The encyclopaedic knowledge in such poems is
regarded sacramentally, as a human analogy of divine knowledge.
The age of romantic heroes is largely a nomadic age, and its
poets are frequently wanderers. The blind wandering minstrel
is traditional in both Greek and Celtic literature; Old English
poetry expresses some of the bleakest loneliness in the language;
troubadours and Goliardic satirists roam over Europe in the
Middle Ages; Dante himself was an exile. Or, if the poet stays
where he is, it is poetry that travels: folk tales follow the trade
routes; ballads and romances return from the great fairs; or
Malory, writing in England, tells his readers what the 'Trench
book'' says that has come to his hand. Of all fictions, the marvel-
lous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted, and it
is this fiction that is employed as a parable in the definitive
encyclopaedic poem of the mode, Dante's Commedia. Poetry
in this mode is an agent of catholicity, whether Hellenic in one
age or Roman Christian in another.
Its typical episodic theme is perhaps best described as the
theme of the boundary of consciousness, the sense of the poetic
mind as passing from one world to another, or as simultaneously
aware of both. The poem of exile, the lay of the Widsith or
wayfarer who may be a wandering minstrel, a rejected lover, or
a nomadic satirist, normally contrasts the worlds of memory and
of experience. The poem of vision, conventionally dated on a
May morning, contrasts the worlds of experience and dream. The
57
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
poem of revelation through female or divine grace contrasts the
old dispensation with the vita nuova. In the opening lines of
the Inferno the afSnity of the great encyclopaedic poem with
both the poem of exile and the poem of vision is clearly marked.
The high mimetic ‘ period brings in a society more strongly
established around the court and capital city, and a centripetal
perspective replaces the centrifugal one of romance. The distant
goals of the quest, the Holy Grail or the City of God, modulate
into symbols of convergence, the emblems of prince, nation, and
national faith. The encyclopaedic poems of this period, The
Faerie Queene, The Lusiad, Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost,
are national epics unified by patriotic and religious ideas. The
reasons for the exceptional role of the political elements in
Paradise Lost are familiar, and constitute no real difficulty in
seeing it as a national epic. Along with The Pilgrim's Progress,
it also constitutes a kind of introduction to English low mimetic,
being in one of its essential aspects the story of Everyman. Such
thematic epics are as a rule recognizably different in emphasis
from narratives where the primary interest is in telling the story,
as in most epic poetry of the heroic age, most Icelandic sagas
and Celtic romances, and, in the Renaissance period, in the
greater part of Orlando Furioso, though Renaissance critics showed
that it was quite possible to interpret Ariosto thematically.
The central episodic theme of the high mimetic is the theme
of cynosure or centripetal gaze, which, whether addressed to
mistress, friend, or deity, seems to have something about it of
the court gazing upon its sovereign, the courtroom gazing upon
the orator, or the audience gazing upon the actor. For the high
mimetic poet is pre-eminently a courtier, a counsellor, a preacher,
a public orator or a master of decorum, and the high mimetic is
the period in which the settled theatre comes into its own as
the chief medium of fictional forms. In Shakespeare the control
of decorum is so great that his personality disappears behind it
altogether, but this is unlikely to happen with a dramatist who
has a strong thematic interest, like Ben Jonson. As a mle the
high mimetic poet tends to think of his function in relation to
social or divine leadership, the theme of leadership being at the
center of his normal fictional mode. The courtier-poet devotes
his learning to the court and his life to courtesy: the function
of his education is the service of his prince and the climax of
58
THEORY OF MODES
it is courtly love, conceived as the fulfilling of the gaze upon
beauty in the union with it. The religious poet may transfer
this imagery to the spiritual life, as the English metaphysicals
often do, or he may find his centripetal images in the liturgy.
Jesuit poetry of the seventeenth century, and its English counter-
part in Crashaw, have a unique quality of iconic intensity:
Herbert, too, draws his reader step by step into a visible “temple.''
The literary Platonism of the high mimetic period is of a kind
appropriate to the mode. Most of the Renaissance humanists show
a strong sense of the importance of symposium and dialogue, the
social and educational aspects respectively of an elite culture. There
is also a widespread assumption that the dianoia of poetry repre-
sents a form, pattern, ideal, or model in nature. “Nature's world
is brazen," says Sidney: “the poets only deliver a golden." He makes
it clear that this golden world is not something separated from
nature but is “in effect a second nature": a unification of fact, or
example, with model, or precept. What is usually called the “neo-
classical" in art and criticism is chiefly, in our terms, a sense of
poetic dianoia as a manifestation of the true form of nature, the
true form being assumed to be ideal.
With the low mimetic, where fictional forms deal with an in-
tensely individualized society, there is only one thing for an analogy
of myth to become, and that is an act of individual creation. The
typical result of this is “Romanticism," a thematic development
which to a considerable extent turns away from contemporary
forms of fiction and develops its own contrasting kind. The qualities
necessary to create Hyperion and the qualities necessary to create
Pride and Prejudice, though contemporary, seem curiously opposed
to each other, as though there were a sharper division between
fictional and thematic in the low mimetic than in other modes. To
some extent this is true, for a sense of contrast between subjective
and objective, mental state and outward condition, individual and
social or physical data, is characteristic of the low mimetic. In this
age the thematic poet becomes what the fictional hero was in the
age of romance, an extraordinary person who lives in a higher and
more imaginative order of experience than that of nature. He creates
his own world, a world which reproduces many of the characteristics
of fictional romance already touched on. The Romantic poet's
mind is normally in a state of pantheistic rapport with nature, and
seems curiously invulnerable to the assaults of real evil. A tendency.
59
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
also paralleled in the earlier fictional romance, to transmute pain
and terror into a form of pleasure is reflected in the sadism and
diabolic imagery of the "‘Romantic agony/^ The encyclopaedic
tendency of this period is toward the construction of mythological
epics in which the myths represent psychological or subjective
states of mind. Faust, especially in the second part, is the most
nearly definitive example; the prophecies of Blake and the mytho-
logical poems of Keats and Shelley are the best known English
representatives.
The thematic poet of this period is interested in himself, not
necessarily out of egotism, but because the basis of his poetic skill
is individual, and hence genetic and psychological. He uses bio-
logical metaphors; he contrasts the organic with the dead or
mechanical; he thinks socially in terms of a biological difference
between the genius and the ordinary man, and genius to him is a
fertile seed among abortive ones. He confronts nature directly, as
an individual, and, in contrast to most of his predecessors, is apt
to think of literary tradition as a second-hand substitute for per-
sonal experience. Like the hero of low mimetic comedy, the
Romantic poet is often socially aggressive: the possession of creative
genius confers authority, and its social impact is revolutionary.
Romantic critics often develop theories of poetry as the rhetoric
of personal greatness. The central episodic theme is the analysis or
presentation of the subjective mental state, a theme usually taken
to be typical of the literary movements accompanying Rousseau
and Byron. ‘Fhe Romantic poet finds it much easier than his
predecessors to be at once individual in content and attitude and
continuous in form. The fact that so many of Wordsworth's shorter
poems could be absorbed into the Prelude, in much the way in
which primitive lays stick together to form epics, represents a tech-
nical innovation of some significance.
The poets who succeed the Romantics, the poets of French
symbolisme for example, begin with the ironic gesture of turning
away from the world of the market-place, with all its blurred
sounds and imprecise meanings: they renounce rhetoric, moral
judgement, and all other idols of the tribe, and devote their entire
energy to the poet's literal function as a maker of poems. We said
that the ironic fiction-writer is influenced by no considerations ex-
cept craftsmanship, and the thematic poet in the ironic age thinks
of himself more as a craftsman than as a creator or ""unacknowl-
6o
THEORY OF MODES
edged legislator.” That is, he makes the minimum claim for his
personality and the maximum for his art— a contrast which under-
lies Yeats's theory of the poetic mask. At his best he is a dedicated
spirit, a saint or anchorite of poetry. Flaubert, Rilke, Mallarm6,
Proust, were all in their very different ways “pure” artists. Hence
the central episodic theme is the theme of the pure but transient
vision, the aesthetic or timeless moment, Rimbaud's illumination,
Joyce's epiphany, the Augenblick of modern German thought, and
the kind of non-didactic revelation implied in such terms as sym-
bolisme and imagism.
The comparison of such instants with the vast panorama un-
rolled by history (''temps perdu”) is the main theme of the encyclo-
paedic tendency. In Proust the repetitions of certain experiences at
widely scattered intervals create these timeless moments out of
time; in Finnegans Wake the whole of history itself is presented as
a single gigantic anti-epiphany. On a smaller but still encyclopaedic
scale, Eliot's The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf's last and most
profound book. Between the Acts, have in common (a fact more
striking because they have nothing else in common) a sense of
contrast between the course of a whole civilization and the tiny
flashes of significant moments which reveal its meaning. And just
as the Romantic poet found it possible to write as an individual in
continuous forms, so the ironic mode is rationalized by critical
theories of the essential discontinuity of poetry. The paradoxical
technique of the poetry which is encyclopaedic and yet discontinu-
ous, the technique of The Waste Land and of Ezra Pound's
Cantos, is, like its direct opposite in Wordsworth, a technical in-
novation heralding a new mode.
Details of the same technique fit the general pattern of thematic
irony. The ironic method of saying one thing and meaning some-
thing rather different is incorporated in Mallarmd's doctrine of the
avoidance of direct statement. The practice of cutting out predica-
tion, of simply juxtaposing images without making any assertions
about their relationship, is consistent with the effort to avoid ora-
torical rhetoric. The same is true of the elimination of apostrophes
and similar devices for including some mimesis of direct address.
One study has even demonstrated a substantial increase in the use
of the definite article in the ironic mode, a use said to be linked
with the implicit sense of an initiated group aware of a real mean-
ing behind an ironically baffling exterior.
6i
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
The return of irony to myth that we noted in fiction is paralleled
by some tendencies of the ironic craftsman to return to the oracular.
This tendency is often accompanied by cyclical theories of history
which help to rationalize the idea of a return, the appearance of
such theories being a typical phenomenon of the ironic mode. We
have Rimbaud and his '"d^r^glement de tons les sens'' designed to
make himself a reincarnation of the Prometheus who brought the
divine fire to man and to restore the old mythical connection be-
tween the manic and the mantic. We have Rilke and his lifetime
of tense listening to an oracular voice within him. We have
Nietzsche proclaiming the advent of a new divine power in man,
a proclamation which is somewhat confused by including a the-
ory of identical recurrence. We have Yeats telling us that the
Western cycle is nearly over and that a new Classical one, with
Leda and the swan taking the place of the dove and the virgin, is
about to begin. We have Joyce and his Viconian theory of history
which sees our own age as a frustrated apocalypse followed instantly
by a return to a period before Tristram.
As for the inferences which may be made from the above survey,
one is clearly that many current critical assumptions have a limited
historical context. In our day an ironic provincialism, which looks
everywhere in literature for complete objectivity, suspension of
moral judgements, concentration on pure verbal craftsmanship, and
similar virtues, is in the ascendant. A Romantic provincialism, which
looks everywhere for genius and evidences of great personality, is
more old-fashioned, but it is still around. The high mimetic mode
also had its pedants, some of them still trying to apply canons of
ideal form in the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries. The
suggestion made here is that no set of critical standards derived
from only one mode can ever assimilate the whole truth about
poetry.
There may be noticed a general tendency to react most strongly
against the mode immediately preceding, and, to a lesser extent,
to return to some of the standards of the modal grandfather. Thus
the humanists of the high mimetic age were in general contemptu-
ous of the “fablers and loud lyars,” as Spenser's E.K. calls them,
who produced medieval romance. But, as we can see in Sidney,
they were never tired of justifying poetry by referring to the social
importance of the original mythical phase. They tended to think
62
THEORY OF MODES
of themselves as secular oracles of the order of nature, responding
to the occasions of public aEairs like the oracular poets, within a
context of social and natural law. The Romantics, the thematic
poets of the low mimetic period, set their faces against their prede-
cessors' methods of following nature, and went back to the mode
of romance.
The Romantic standards, in English literature, were in the main
carried on by the Victorians, indicating a continuity of mode; the
long anti'Romantic revolt that began around 1900 (several decades
earlier in French literature) indicated a shift to the ironic. In the
new mode the fondness for the small closely-knit group, the sense
of the esoteric, and the nostalgia for the aristocratic that has pro-
duced such very different phenomena as the royalism of Eliot, the
fascism of Pound, and the cult of chivalry in Yeats, are all in a way
part of a reversion to high mimetic standards. The sense of the poet
as courtier, of poetry as the service of a prince, of the supreme im-
portance of the symposium or elite group, are among the high
mimetic conceptions reflected in twentieth-century literature, es-
pecially in the poetry of the symboliste tradition from Mallarme
to George and Rilke. The exceptions to this tendency are sometimes
less exceptional than they seem. The Fabian Society, when Bernard
Shaw first joined it, was a group esoteric enough to satisfy Yeats
himself: after Fabian socialism became a mass movement, Shaw
turned into what became at length unmistakably a frustrated
royalist.
Again, we may note that each period of Western culture has
made a conspicuous use of the Classical literature nearest to it in
mode: romanticized versions of Homer in the Middle Ages; Vir-
gilian epic, Platonic symposium, and Ovidian courtly love in the
high mimetic; Roman satire in the low mimetic; the products of
the latest possible period of Latin in the ironic phase of Huysmans'
A Rebours.
We saw in our survey of fictional modes that the poet never
imitates 'life" in the sense that life becomes anything more than
the content of his work. In every mode he imposes the same kind
of mythical form on his content, but makes different adaptations
of it. In thematic modes, similarly, the poet never imitates thought
except in the same sense of imposing a literary form on his thought.
The failure to understand this produces a fallacy to which we may
give the general term "existential projection." Suppose a writer
63
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
finds that he is most successful with tragedies. His works will in-
evitably be full of gloom and catastrophe, and in his final scenes
there will be characters standing around making remarks about the
sternness of necessity, the vicissitudes of fortune, and the inelucta-
bility of fate. Such sentiments are part of the dianoia of tragedy;
but a writer who specializes in tragedy may well come to feel that
they speak for the profoundest of all philosophies, and begin to
emit similar utterances himself when asked what his own philos-
ophy of life is. On the other hand, a writer whose specialty is
comedy and happy endings will have his characters standing around
at the end talking about the beneficence of providence, the miracles
that come when we least expect them, the spirit of thankfulness
and joy which we all ought to feel for the mercies of life.
It is natural, then, for tragedy and comedy to throw their shad-
ows, so to speak, into philosophy and shape there a philosophy of
fate and a philosophy of providence respectively. Thomas Hardy
and Bernard Shaw both flourished around 1900 and both were in-
terested in evolution. Hardy did better with tragedy, and saw
evolution in terms of a stoical meliorism, a Schopenhauerian im-
manent will, and an activity of ''chance'' or "hap" in which any
individual life may be expendable. Shaw, who wrote comedies, saw
evolution as creative, leading to revolutionary politics, the advent
of a Superman, and to whatever metabiology is. But it is obvious
that Hardy and Shaw are not substantial philosophers, and they
must stand or fall by their achievements in poetry, fiction, and
drama.
Similarly, each mode of literature develops its own existential
projection. Mythology projects itself as theology: that is, a mytho-
poeic poet usually accepts some myths as "true" and shapes his
poetic structure accordingly. Romance peoples the world with fan-
tastic, normally invisible personalities or powers: angels, demons,
fairies, ghosts, enchanted animals, elemental spirits like those in
The Tempest and Comm, Dante wrote in this mode, but not
speculatively: he accepted the spiritual beings recognized by Chris-
tian doctrine, and concerns himself with no others. But for a late
poet interested in the techniques of romance— Yeats, for instance—
the question of whether and which of these mysterious creatures
"really exist" is likely to project itself. The high mimetic projects
mainly a quashPlatonic philosophy of ideal forms, like the love
and beauty of Spenser's hymns or the virtues of The Faerie Queene,
THEORY OF MODES
and the low mimetic mainly a philosophy of genesis and organism,
like that of Goethe, which finds unity and development in every-
thing. The existential projection of irony is, perhaps, existentialism
itself; and the return of irony to myth is accompanied, not only
by the cyclical theories of history mentioned above, but, in a later
stage, by a widespread interest in sacramental philosophy and dog-
matic theology.
Mr. Eliot distinguishes between the poet who creates a philos-
ophy for himself, and the poet who takes over one that he finds
to hand, and advances the view that the latter course is better, or
at least safer, for most poets. The distinction is fundamentally a
distinction between the practice of the thematic poets of the low
mimetic and of the ironic modes. Such poets as Blake, Shelley,
Goethe, and Victor Hugo were compelled by the conventions of
their mode to present the conceptual aspect of their imagery as
self-generated; the poets of the last century have different con-
ventions and different compulsions. But if the view taken here of
the relation of form to content in poetry is sound, then no matter
which he does the poet will still have much the same technical
problems to face.
Ever since Aristotle criticism has tended to think of literature as
essentially mimetic, and as divided between a ''high'' form of epic
and tragedy dealing with ruling-class figures, and a "low" form con-
fined to comedy and satire and more concerned with characters
like ourselves. The larger scheme set forth in this chapter will, it
is hoped, afford a useful background against which to relate the
different and apparently contradictory remarks of Plato about
poetry. Phaedms deals largely with poetry as myth, and forms a
commentary on Plato's treatment of myth; Ion, which is centered
on the figure of a minstrel or rhapsode, sets forth both the en-
cyclopaedic and the memorial conceptions of poetry which are
typical of the romantic mode; the Symposium, which introduces
Aristophanes, adopts the high mimetic canons which are probably
nearest to Plato's own views. The famous discussion at the end
of the Republic then falls into its place as a polemic against the
low mimetic element in poetry, and in the Cratylus we are intro-
duced to the ironic techniques of ambiguity, verbal association,
paronomasia, and the apparatus now being revived by criticism to
6 ?
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
deal with the poetry of the ironic mode— the criticism which, by
a further refinement of irony, is called “new'' criticism.
Again, the difference in emphasis that we have described as
fictional and thematic corresponds to a distinction between two
views of literature that has run all through the history of criticism.
These two views are the aesthetic and the creative, the Aristotelian
and the Longinian, the view of literature as product and the view
of literature as process. For Aristotle, the poem is a techne or
aesthetic artifact: he is, as a critic, mainly interested in the more
objective fictional forms, and his central conception is catharsis.
Catharsis implies the detachment of the spectator, both from the
work of art itself and from the author. The phrase ‘‘aesthetic dis-
tance" is generally accepted now in criticism, but it is almost a
tautology: wherever there is aesthetic apprehension there is emo-
tional and intellectual detachment. The principles of catharsis in
other fictional forms than tragedy, such as comedy or satire, were
not worked out by Aristotle, and have therefore never been worked
out since.
In the thematic aspect of literature, the external relation between
author and reader becomes more prominent, and when it does, the
emotions of pity and terror are involved or contained rather than
purged. In catharsis the emotions are purged by being attached to
objects; where they are involved with the response they are unat-
tached and remain prior conditions in the mind. We have noticed
that terror without an object, as a condition of mind prior to being
afraid of anything, is now conceived as Angst or anxiety, a some-
what narrow term for a feeling that extends from the pleasure of
II Pemeroso to the pain of the Fleurs du Mai. In the general area
of pleasure comes the conception of the sublime, in which austerity,
gloom, grandeur, melancholy, or even menace are a source of
romantic or penseroso feelings.
Similarly, we defined pity without an object as an imaginative
animism which finds human qualities everywhere in nature, and
includes the “beautiful," traditionally the corresponding term to the
sublime. The beautiful has the same relation to the diminutive that
the sublime has to bigness, and is closely related to the sense of the
intricate and exquisite. The fairies of English folklore become
Shakespeare's Mustard-Seed and Drayton's Pigwiggen, and Yeats's
animism is linked to his sense of “many ingenious lovely things,"
and to his image of the toy bird in Sailing to Byzantium.
66
THEORY OF MODES
Just as catharsis is the central conception of the Aristotelian
approach to literature, so ecstasis or absorption is the central con-
ception of the Longinian approach. This is a state of identification
in which the reader, the poem, and sometimes, at least ideally, the
poet also, are involved. We say reader, because the Longinian con-
ception is primarily that of a thematic or individualized response:
it is more useful for lyrics, just as the Aristotelian one is more
useful for plays. Sometimes, however, the normal categories of ap-
proach are not the right ones. In Hamlet, as Mr. Eliot has shown,
the amount of emotion generated by the hero is too great for its
objects; but surely the correct conclusion to draw from this fine
insight is that Hamlet is best approached as a tragedy of Angst or
of melancholy as a state in itself, rather than purely as an Aristo-
telian imitation of an action. On the other hand, the lack of
emotional involvement in Lycidas has been thought by some, in-
cluding Johnson, to be a failure in that poem, but surely the correct
conclusion is that Lycidas, like Samson Agonistes, should be read
in terms of catharsis with all passion spent.
67
SECOND ESSAY
Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols
Secon<l Essay
ETHICAL CRITICISM: THEORY OF SYMBOLS
INTRODUCTION
Of the problems arising from the lack of a technical vocabulary
of poetics, two demand special attention. The fact, already men-
tioned, that there is no word for a work of literary art is one that
I find particularly baffling. One may invoke the authority of Aris-
totle for using 'poem” in this sense, but usage declares that a poem
is a composition in metre, and to speak of Tom Jones as a poem
would be an abuse of ordinary language. One may discuss the ques-
tion whether great works of prose deserve to be called poetry in
some more extended sense, but the answer can only be a matter of
taste in definitions. The attempt to introduce a value-judgement
into a definition of poetry (e.g., "What, after all, do we mean by
a poem— that is, something worthy of the name of poem?”) only
adds to the confusion. So of course does the antique snobbery about
the superiority of metre which has given "prosy” the meaning of
tedious and "prosaic” the meaning of pedestrian. As often as I
can, I use "poem” and its relatives by synecdoche, because they are
short words; but where synecdoche would be confusing, the reader
will have to put up with such cacophonous jargon as "hypothetical
verbal structure” and the like.
nfh f?r matt er cnncems t he use of the word "symbol,” which
in this essay means any unit of an^iterarv structuffe thatlan be
i^lated for cri tical attention . A word, a phrase, or an image used
with some kinSTof special reference (which is what a symbol is
usually taken to mean) are all symbols when they are distinguisha-
ble elements in critical analysis. Even the letters a writer spells
his words with form part of his symbolism in this sense: they would
be isolated only in special cases, such as alliteration or dialect spell-
ings, but we are still aware that they symbolize sounds. Criticism
as a whole, in terms of this definition, would begin with, and
largely consist of, the systematizing of literary symbolism. It fol-
lows that other words must be used to classify the different types
of symbolism.
For there must be different types: the criticism of literature can
hardly be a simple or one-level activity. The more familiar one is
71
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
with a great work of literature, the more one's understanding of it
grows. Further, one has the feeling of growing in the understanding
of the work itself, not in the number of things one can attach to it.
The conclusion that a work of literary art contains a variety or
sequence of meanings seems inescapable. It has seldom, however,
been squarely faced in criticism since the Middle Ages, when a
precise scheme of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic meanings
was taken over from theology and applied to literature. Today
there is more of a tendency to consider the problem of literary
meaning as subsidiary to the problems of symbolic logic and
semantics. In what follows I try to work as independently of the
latter subjects as I can, on the ground that the obvious place to
start looking for a theory of literary meaning is in literature.
The principle of manifold or '"‘polysemous" meaning, as Dante
calls it, is not a theory any more, still less an exploded superstition,
but an established fact. The thing that has established it is the
simultaneous development of several different schools of modem
criticism, each making a distinctive choice of symbols in its
analysis. The modern student of critical theory is faced with a body
of rhetoricians who speak of texture and frontal assaults, with
students of history who deal with traditions and sources, with
critics using material from psychology and anthropology, with
Aristotelians, Coleridgians, Thomists, Freudians, Jungians, Marx-
ists, with students of myths, rituals, archetypes, metaphors, ambi-
guities, and significant forms. The student must either admit the
principle of polysemous meaning, or choose one of these groups
and then try to prove that all the others are less legitimate. The
former is the way of scholarship, and leads to the advancement of
learning; the latter is the way of pedantry, and gives us a wide
choice of goals, the most conspicuous today being fantastical learn-
ing, or myth criticism, contentious learning, or historical criticism,
and delicate learning, or ''new" criticism.
Once we have admitted the principle of polysemous meaning,
we can either stop with a purely relative and pluralistic position,
or we can go on to consider the possibility that there is a finite num-
ber of valid critical methods, and that they can all be contained in a
single theory. It does not follow that all meanings can be arranged,
as the medieval four-level scheme implies, in a hierarchical se-
quence, in which the first steps are comparatively elementary and
apprehension gets more subtle and rarefied as one goes on. The
72
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
term “level” is used here only for convenience, and should not be
taken as indicating any belief on my part in a series of degrees of
critical initiation. Again, there is a general reservation to be made
about the conception of polysemous meaning: the meaning of a
literary work forms a part of a larger whole. In the previous essay
we saw that meaning or dianoia was one of three elements, the other
two being mythos or narrative and ethos or characterization. It is
better to think, therefore, not simply of a sequence of meanings,
but of a sequence of contexts or relationships in which the whole
work of literary art can be placed, each context having its charac-
teristic mythos and ethos as well as its dianoia or meaning. I call
these contexts or relationships “phases.”
LITERAL AND DESCRIPTIVE PHASES:
SYMBOL AS MOTIF AND AS SIGN
Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in
two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in
which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words
to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the con-
ventional association between them. The other direction is inward
or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of
the larger verbal pattern they make. In both cases we deal with
symbols, but when we attach an external meaning to a word we
have, in addition to the verbal symbol, the thing represented or
symbolized by it. Actually we have a series of such representations:
the verbal symbol “cat” is a group of black marks on a page repre-
senting a sequence of noises representing an image or memory
representing a sense experience representing an animal that says
meow. Symbols so understood may here be called signs, verbal
units which, conventionally and arbitrarily, stand for and point
to things outside the place where they occur. When we are trying
to grasp the context of words, however, the word “cat” is an ele-
ment in a larger body of meaning. It is not primarily a symbol “of”
anything, for in this aspect it does not represent, but connects. We
can hardly even say that it represents a part of the author's inten-
tion in putting it there, for the author's intention <^a^ to exist
as a separate factor as soon as he has finished revising. VerM
elements und erstood inwardly or c enfeip etally, as parts of a ve^l
uniB’'H'TveSal structui^^ should be kq>t
73
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
in mind.) We may, borrowing a term from music, call such ele-
ments motifs.
These two modes of understanding take place simultaneously
in all reading. It is impossible to read the word “cat'' in a context
without some representational flash of the animal so named; it
is impossible to see the bare sign “cat" without wondering what
context it belongs to. But verbal structures may be classified ac-
cording to whether the fined direction of meaning is outward or
inward. In descriptive or assertive writing the final direction is
outward. Here the verbal structure is intended to represent things
external to it, and it is valued in terms of the accuracy with which
it does represent them. Correspondence between phenomenon and
verbal sign is truth; lack of it is falsehood; failure to connect is
tautology, a purely verbal structure that cannot come out of itself.
In all literary verbal structures the final direction of meaning is
inward. In literature the standards of outward meaning are second-
ary, for literary works do not pretend to describe or assert, and
hence are not true, not false, and yet not tautological either, or
at least not in the sense in which such a statement as “the good is
better than the bad" is tautological. Literary meaning may best be
described, perhaps, as hypothetical, and a hypothetical or assumed
relation to the external world is part of what is usually meant by
the word “imaginative." This word is to be distinguished from
“imaginary," which usually refers to an assertive verbal structure
that fails to make good its assertions. In literature, questions of fact
or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing
a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols
are subordinated to their importance as a structure of intercon-
nected motifs. Wherever we have an autonomous verbal structure
of this kind, we have literature. Wherever this autonomous struc-
ture is lacking, we have language, words used instrumentally to help
human consciousness do or understand something else. Literature
is a specialized form of language, as language is of communication.
The reason for producing the literary structure is apparently that
the inward meaning, the self-contained verbal pattern, is the field
of the responses connected with pleasure, beauty, and interest. The
contemplation of a detached pattern, whether of words or not, is
clearly a major source of the sense of the beautiful, and of the
pleasure that accompanies it. The fact that interest is most easily
aroused by such a pattern is familiar to every handler of words, from
74
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
the poet to the aftepdinner speaker who digresses from an assertive
harangue to present the self-contained structure of verbal inter-
relationships known as a joke. It often happens that an originally
descriptive piece of writing, such as the histories of Fuller and
Gibbon, survives by virtue of its ''style,'' or interesting verbal pat-
tern, after its value as a representation of facts has faded.
The old precept that poetry is designed to delight and instruct
sounds like an awkward hendiadys, as we do not usually feel that
a poem does two different things to us, but we can understand it
when we relate it to these two aspects of symbolism. In literature,
what entertains is prior to what instructs, or, as we may say, the
reality-principle is subordinate to the pleasure-principle. In assertive
verbal structures the priority is reversed. Neither factor can, of
course, ever be eliminated from any kind of writing.
One of the most familiar and important features of literature is
the absence of a controlling aim of descriptive accuracy. We should,
perhaps, like to feel that the writer of a historical drama knew
what the historical facts of his theme were, and that he would not
alter them without good reason. But that such good reasons may
exist in literature is not denied by anyone. They seem to exist only
there: the historian selects his facts, but to suggest that he had
manipulated them to produce a more symmetrical structure would
be grounds for libel. Some other types of verbal structures, such as
theology and metaphysics, are declared by some to be centripetal in
final meaning, and hence to be tautological ("purely verbal"). I
have no opinion on this, except that in literary criticism theology
and metaphysics must be treated as assertive, because they are out-
side literature, and everything that influences literature from with-
out creates a centrifugal movement in it, whether it is directed
toward the nature of absolute being or advice on the raising of
hops. It is clear, too, that the proportion between the sense of being
pleasantly entertained and the sense of being instructed, or awak-
ened to reality, will vary in different forms of literature. The sense
of reality is, for instance, far higher in tragedy than in comedy, as
in comedy the logic of events normally gives way to the audience's
desire for a happy ending.
The apparently unique privilege of ignoring facts has given the
poet his traditional reputation as a licensed liar, and explains why
so many words denoting literary structure, "fable," "fiction,"
"myth," and the like, have a secondary sense of untruth, like tfie
75
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
Norwegian word digter which is said to mean liar as well as poet.
But, as Sir Philip Sidney remarked, '*the poet never afErmeth,'" and
therefore does not lie any more than he tells the truth. The poet,
like the pure mathematician, depends, not on descriptive truth,
but on conformity to his hypothetical postulates. The appearance
of a ghost in Hamlet presents the hypothesis “let there be a ghost
in Hamletr It has nothing to do with whether ghosts exist or not,
or whether Shakespeare or his audience thought they did. A reader
who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does
not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters,
clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction
from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send
cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap
operas. We may note here, as the point will be important later,
that the accepted postulate, the contract agreed on by the reader
before he can start reading, is the same thing as a convention.
The person who cannot be brought to understand literary con-
vention is often said to be “literal-minded."' But as “literal"" surely
ought to have some connection with letters, it seems curious to use
the phrase “literal-minded"" for imaginative illiterates. The reason
for the anomaly is interesting, and important to our argument.
Traditionally, the phrase “literal meaning"" refers to descriptive
meaning that is free from ambiguity. We usually say that the
word cat “means literally"" a cat when it is an adequate sign for
a cat, when it stands in a simple representative relation to the
animal that says meow. This sense of the term literal comes dovm
from medieval times, and may be due to the theological origin
of critical categories. In theology, the literal meaning of Scripture
is usually the historical meaning, its accuracy as a record of facts
or truths. Dante says, commenting on the verse in the Psalms,
“When Israel went out of Egypt,"" “considering the letter only,
the exodus of the Israelites to Palestine in the time of Moses is
what is signified to us {significatur nobis) ** The word “signified""
shows that the literal meaning here is the simplest kind of descrip-
tive or representational meaning, as it would still be to a Biblical
“literalist.""
But this conception of literal meaning as simple descriptive
meaning will not do at all for literary criticism. An historical event
cannot be literally anything but an historical event; a prose narra-
tive describing it cannot be literally anything but a prose narrative,
76
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
The literal meaning of Dante's own Commedia is not historical,
not at any rate a simple description of what "‘really happened" to
Dante. And if a poem cannot be literally anything but a poem,
then the literal basis of meaning in poetry can only be its letters, its
inner structure of interlocking motifs. We are always wrong, in the
context of criticism, when we say “this poem means literally"—
and then give a prose paraphrase of it. All paraphrases abstract a
secondary or outward meaning. Understanding a poem literally
means understanding the whole of it, as a poem, and as it stands.
Such understanding begins in a complete surrender of the mind
and senses to the impact of the work as a whole, and proceeds
through the effort to unite the symbols toward a simultaneous per-
ception of the unity of the structure. (Tliis is a logical sequence of
critical elements, the integritaSy consonantia, and claritas of Ste-
phen's argument in Joyce's Portrait. I have no idea what the psy-
chological sequence is, or whether there is a sequence— I suppose
there would not be in a Gestalt theory.) Literal understanding
occupies the same place in criticism that observation, the direct
exposure of the mind to nature, has in the scientific method. “Every
poem must necessarily be a perfect unity," says Blake: this, as the
wording implies, is not a statement of fact about all existing poems,
but a statement of the hypothesis which every reader adopts in
first trying to comprehend even the most chaotic poem ever written.
Some principle of recurrence seems to be fundamental to all
works of art, and this recurrence is usually spoken of as rhythm
when it moves along in time, and as pattern when it is spread out
in space. Thus we speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern
of painting. But a slight increase of sophistication will soon start
us talking about the pattern of music and the rhythm of painting.
The inference is that all arts possess both a temporal and a spatial
aspect, whichever takes the lead when they are presented. The
score of a symphony may be studied all at once, as a spread-out
pattern: a painting may be studied as the track of an intricate
dance of the eye. Works of literature also move in time like music
and spread out in images liTce painting. The word narrative or
mythos conveys the sense of movement caught by the ear, and
the word meaning or dianoia conveys, or at least preserves, the smse
of simultaneity caught by the eye. We listen to the poem as it
moves from beginning to end, but as soon as the whole of it is in
our minds at once we “see" what it means. More exactly, this re-
77
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
sponse is not simply to the whole of it, but to a whole in it: we
have a vision of meaning or dianoia whenever any simultaneous
apprehension is possible.
Now as a poem is literally a poem, it belongs, in its literal con-
text, to the class of things called poems, which in their turn form
part of the larger class known as works of art. The poem from this
point of view presents a flow of sounds approximating music on
one side, and an integrated pattern of imagery approximating the
pictorial on the other. Literally, then, a poem's narrative is its
rhythm or movement of words. If a dramatist writes a speech in
prose, and then rewrites it in blank verse, he has made a strategic
rhythmical change, and therefore a change in the literal narrative.
Even if he alters “came a day” to “a day came” he has still made
a tiny alteration of sequence, and so, literally, of his rhythm and
narrative. Similarly, a poem's meaning is literally its pattern or in-
tegrity as a verbal structure. Its words cannot be separated and at-
tached to sign-values: all possible sign-values of a word are ab-
sorbed into a complexity of verbal relationships.
The word's meaning is therefore, from the centripetal or in-
ward-meaning point of view, variable or ambiguous, to use a term
now familiar in criticism, a term which, significantly enough, is
pejorative when applied to assertive writing. The word “wit” is said
to be employed in Pope's Essay on Criticism in nine different
senses. In assertive writing, such a semantic theme with variations
could produce nothing but hopeless muddle. In poetry, it indicates
the ranges of meanings and contexts that a word may have. The
poet does not equate a word with a meaning; he establishes the
functions or powers of words. But when we look at the symbols
of a poem as verbal signs, the poem appears in a different context
altogether, and so do its narrative and meaning. Descriptively, a
poem is not primarily a work of art, but primarily a verbal structure
or set of representative words, to be classed with other verbal struc-
tures like books on gardening. In this context narrative means the
relation of the order of words to events resembling the events in
“life” outside; meaning means the relation of its pattern to a body
of assertive propositions, and the conception of symbolism involved
is the one which literature has in common, not with the arts, but
with other structures in words.
A considerable amount of abstraction enters at this stage. When
we think of a poem's narrative as a description of events, we no
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
longer think of the narrative as literally embracing every word and
letter. We think rather of a sequence of gross events, of the obvious
and externally striking elements in the word-order. Similarly, we
think of meaning as the kind of discursive meaning that a prose
paraphrase of the poem might reproduce. Hence a parallel abstrac-
tion comes into the conception of symbolism. On the literal level,
where the symbols are motifs, any unit whatever, down to the
letters, may be relevant to our understanding. But only large and
striking symbols are likely to be treated critically as signs: nouns
and verbs, and phrases built up out of important words. Preposi-
tions and conjunctions are almost pure connectives. A dictionary,
which is primarily a table of conventional sign-values, can tell us
nothing about such words unless we already understand them.
So literature in its descriptive context is a body of hypothetical
verbal structures. The latter stand between the verbal structures
that describe or arrange actual events, or histories, and those that
describe or arrange actual ideas or represent physical objects, like
the verbal structures of philosophy and science. THie relation of the
spatial to the conceptual world is one that we obviously cannot
examine here; but from the point of view of literary criticism, de-
scriptive writing and didactic writing, the representation of natural
objects and of ideas, are simply two different branches of cen-
trifugal meaning. We may use the word '*plot'' or ‘‘story” for the
sequence of gross events, and the connection of story with his-
tory is indicated in its etymology. But it is more difficult to use
“thought,” or even “thought-content,” for the representational as-
pect of pattern, or gross meaning, because “thought” also describes
what we are here trying to distinguish it from. Such are the prob-
lems of a vocabulary of poetics.
The literal and the descriptive phases of symbolism are, of course,
present in every work of literature. But we find (as we shall also
find with the other phases) that each phase has a particularly close
relationship to a certain kind of literature, and to a certain type
of critical procedure as well. Literature deeply influenced by the
descriptive aspect of symbolism is likely to tend toward the realistic
in its narrative and toward the didactic or descriptive in its mean-
ing. Its prevailing rhythm will be the prose of direct q)eech, and
its main effort will be to give as clear and honest an impression of
external reality as is possible with a hypothetical structure. In the
documentary naturalism generally associated with such names as
79
SECOND essay: ethical criticism
Zola and Dreiser, literature goes about as far as a representation
of life, to be judged by its accuracy of description rather than by
its integrity as a structure of words, as it could go and still remain
literature. Beyond this point, the hypothetical or fictional element
in literature would begin to dissolve. The limits of literary expres-
sion of this type are, of course, very wide, and nearly all the great
empire of realistic poetry, drama, and prose fiction lies well within
them. But we notice that the great age of documentary naturalism,
the nineteenth century, was also the age of Romantic poetry, which,
by concentrating on the process of imaginative creation, indicated
a feeling of tension between the hypothetical and the assertive
elements in literature.
This tension finally snaps off in the movement generally called
symbolisme, a term which we expand here to take in the whole
tradition which develops with a broad consistency through Mal-
larmd and Rimbaud to Valery in France, Rilke in Germany,
and Pound and Eliot in England. In the theory of symbolisme we
have the complement to extreme naturalism, an emphasis on the
literal aspect of meaning, and a treatment of literature as centripetal
verbal pattern, in which elements of direct or verifiable statement
are subordinated to the integrity of that pattern. The conception
of ''pure” poetry, or evocative verbal structure injured by assertive
meaning, was a minor by-product of the same movement. The
great strength of symbolisme was that it succeeded in isolating the
hypothetical germ of literature, however limited it may have been
in its earlier stages by its tendency to equate this isolation with the
entire creative process. All its characteristics are solidly based on
its conception of poetry as concerned with the centripetal aspect
of meaning. Thus the achieving of an acceptable theory of literal
meaning in criticism rests on a relatively recent development in
literature.
Symbolisme, as expressed for instance in Mallarm6, maintains
that the representational answer to the question "what does this
mean?” should not be pressed in reading poetry, for the poetic
symbol means primarily itself in relation to the poem. The unity
of a poem, then, is best apprehended as a unity of mood, a mood
being a phase of emotion, and emotion being the ordinary word
for the state of mind directed toward the experiencing of pleasure
or the contemplating of beauty. And as moods are not long sus-
tained, literature, for symbolisme, is essentially discontinuous,
So
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
longer poems being held together only by the use of the gram-
matical structures more appropriate to descriptive writing. Poetic
images do not state or point to anything, but, by pointing to each
other, they suggest or evoke the mood which informs the poem.
That is, they express or articulate the mood. The emotion is not
chaotic or inarticulate: it merely would have remained so if it had
not turned into a poem, and when it does so, it is the poem, not
something else still behind it. Nevertheless the words suggest and
evoke are appropriate, because in symbolisme the word does not
echo the thing but other words, and hence the immediate impact
symbolisme makes on the reader is that of incantation, a harmony
of sounds and the sense of a growing richness of meaning unlimited
by denotation.
Some philosophers who assume that all meaning is descriptive
meaning tell us that, as a poem does not describe things rationally,
it must be a description of an emotion. According to this the literal
core of poetry would be a cri de coeur, to use the elegant expression,
the direct statement of a nervous organism confronted with some-
thing that seems to demand an emotional response, like a dog
howling at the moon. U Allegro and II Penseroso would be respec-
tively, according to this theory, elaborations of '1 feel happy'' and
''I feel pensive." We have found, however, that the real core of
poetry is a subtle and elusive verbal pattern that avoids, and does
not lead to, such bald statements. We notice too that in the
history of literature the riddle, the oracle, the spell, and the kenning
are more primitive than a presentation of subjective feelings. The
critics who tell us that the basis of poetic expression is irony, or a
pattern of words that turns away from obvious (i.e., descriptive)
meaning, are much closer to the facts of literary experience, at
least on the literal level. The literary structure is ironic because
''what it says" is always different in kind or degree from "what it
means." In discursive writing what is said tends to approximate,
ideally to become identified with, what is meant.
The criticism as well as the creation of literature reflects the dis-
tinction between literal and descriptive aspects of symbolism. The
type of criticism associated with research and learned journals treats
the poem as a verbal document, to be related as fully as possible
to the history and the ideas that it reflects. The poem is most valua-
ble to this kind of criticism when it is most explicit and descriptive,
and when its core of imaginative hypothesis can be most easily
8i
SECOND essay: ETHICAL CRITICISM
separated. (Note that I am speaking of a kind of criticism, not of
a kind of critic. ) What is now called ""new criticism,” on the other
hand, is largely criticism based on the conception of a poem as
literally a poem. It studies the symbolism of a poem as an ambigu-
ous structure of interlocking motifs; it sees the poetic pattern of
meaning as a self-contained ""texture,” and it thinks of the external
relations of a poem as being with the other arts, to be approached
only with the Horatian warning of favete Unguis, and not with the
historical or the didactic. The word texture, with its overtones of a
complicated surface, is a most expressive one for this approach.
These two aspects of criticism are often thought of as antithetical,
as were, in the previous century, the corresponding groups of writ-
ers. They are of course complementary, not antithetical, but still
the difference in emphasis between them is important to grasp
before we go on to try to resolve the antithesis in a third phase
of symbolism.
FORMAL PHASE: SYMBOL AS IMAGE
We have now established a new sense of the term ""literal mean-
ing” for literary criticism, and have also assigned to literature, as
one of its subordinate aspects of meaning, the ordinary descriptive
meaning that works of literature share with all other structures of
words. But it seems unsatisfactory to stop with this quizzical an-
tithesis between delight and instruction, ironic withdrawal from
reality and explicit connection with it. Surely, it will be said, we
have overlooked the essential unity, in works of literature, expressed
by the commonest of all critical terms, the word form. For the
usual associations of ""form” seem to combine these apparently
contradictory aspects. On the one hand, form implies what we have
called the literal meaning, or unity of structure; on the other, it
implies such complementary terms as content and matter, expres-
sive of what it shares with external nature. The poem is not natural
in form, but it relates itself naturally to nature, and so, to quote
Sidney again, ""doth grow in effect a second nature.”
Here we reach a more unified conception of narrative and mean-
ing. Aristotle speaks of mimesis praxeos, an imitation of an action,
and it appears that he identifies this mimesis praxeos with mythos.
Aristotle's greatly abbreviated account here needs some reconstruc-
tion. Human action {praxis) is primarily imitated by histories, or
verbal structures that describe specific and particular actions. A
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
mythos is a secondary imitation of an action, which means, not that
it is at two removes from reality, but that it describes typical actions,
being more philosophical than history. Human thought [theoria) is
primarily imitated by discursive writing, which makes specific and
particular predications. A dianoia is a secondary imitation of
thought, a mimesis logon, concerned with typical thought, with
the images, metaphors, diagrams, and verbal ambiguities out of
which specific ideas develop. Poetry is thus more historical than
philosophy, more involved in images and examples. For it is clear
that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of
that elusive psychological and physiological process known as
thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements,
sudden inational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, ra-
tionalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to
reach a completely incommunicable intuition. Anyone who im-
agines that philosophy is not a verbal imitation of this process,
but the process itself, has clearly not done much thinking.
The form of a poem, that to which every detail relates, is the
same whether it is examined as stationary or as moving through
the work from beginning to end, just as a musical composition has
the same form when we study the score as it has when we listen
to the performance. The mythos is the dianoia in movement; the
dianoia is the mythos in stasis. One reason why we tend to think
of literary symbolism solely in terms of meaning is that we have
ordinarily no word for the moving body of imagery in a work of
literature. The word form has normally two complementary terms,
matter and content, and it perhaps makes some distinction whether
we think of form as a shaping principle or as a containing one. As
shaping principle, it may be thought of as narrative, organizing
temporally what Milton called, in an age of more exact terminology,
the ''matter” of his song. As containing principle it may be thought
of as meaning, holding the poem together in a simultaneous
structure.
The literary standards generally called "Classical” or "neo-
classical,” which prevailed in Western Europe from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth centuries, have the closest affinity with this formal
phase. Order and clarity are particularly emphasized: order because
of the sense of the importance of grasping a central form, and
clarity because of the feeling that this form must not dissolve or
withdraw into ambiguity, but must preserve a continuous relation-
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ship to the nature which is its own content. It is the attitude char-
acteristic of “humanism'' in the historical sense, an attitude marked
on the one hand by a devotion to rhetoric and verbal craftsmanship,
and on the other by a strong attachment to historical and ethical
affairs.
Writers typical of the formal phase— Ben Jonson for instance-
are sure that they are in contact with reality and that they follow
nature, yet the effect they produce is quite different from the de-
scriptive realism of the nineteenth century, the difference being
largely in the conception of imitation involved. In formal imitation,
or Aristotelian mimesis, the work of art does not reflect external
events and ideas, but exists between the example and the precept.
Events and ideas are now aspects of its content, not external fields
of observation. Historical fictions are not designed to give insight
into a period of history, but are exemplary; they illustrate action,
and are ideal in the sense of manifesting the universal form of
human action. (The vagaries of language make “exemplary" the
adjective for both example and precept.) Shakespeare and Jonson
were keenly interested in history, yet their plays seem timeless; Jane
Austen did not write historical fiction, yet, because she represents
a later and more externalized method of following nature, the
picture she gives of Regency society has a specific historical value.
A poem, according to Hamlet, who, though speaking of acting,
is following a conventional Renaissance line of poetics, holds the
mirror up to nature. We should be careful to notice what this
implies: the poem is not itself a mirror. It does not merely repro-
duce a shadow of nature; it causes nature to be reflected in its
containing form. When the formal critic comes to deal with sym-
bols, therefore, the units he isolates are those which show an
analogy of proportion between the poem and the nature which it
imitates. The symbol in this aspect may best be called the image.
We are accustomed to associate the term “nature" primarily with
the external physical world, and hence we tend to think of an
image as primarily a replica of a natural object. But of course both
words are far more inclusive: nature takes in the conceptual or
intelligible order as well as the spatial one, and what is usually
called an “idea" may be a poetic image also.
One could hardly find a more elementary critical principle than
the fact that the events of a literary fiction are not real but hypo-
thetical events. For some reason it has never been consistently
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
understood that the ideas of literature are not real propositions, but
verbal formulas which imitate real propositions. The Essay on
Man does not expound a system of metaphysical optimism founded
on the chain of being: it uses such a system as a model on which
to construct a series of hypothetical statements which arc more
or less useless as propositions, but inexhaustibly rich and suggestive
when read in their proper context as epigrams. As epigrams, as
solid, resonant, centripetal verbal structures, they may apply point-
edly to millions of human situations which have nothing to do with
metaphysical optimism. Wordsworth's pantheism, Dante's Thom-
ism, Lucretius' Epicureanism, all have to be read in the same w'ay,
as do Gibbon or Macaulay or Hume when they are read for style
instead of subject-matter.
Formal criticism begins with an examination of the imagery of
a poem, with a view to bringing out its distinctive pattern. The
recurring or most frequently repeated images form the tonality, so
to speak, and the modulating, episodic and isolated images relate
themselves to this in a hierarchic structure which is the critical
analogy to the proportions of the poem itself. Every poem has its
peculiar spectroscopic band of imagery, caused by the requirements
of its genre, the predilections of its author, and countless other
factors. In Macbeth, for instance, the images of blood and of
sleeplessness have a thematic importance, as is very natural for a
tragedy of murder and remorse. Hence in the line ''Making the
green one red," the colors are of different thematic intensities.
Green is used incidentally and for contrast; red, being closer to the
key of the play as a whole, is more like the repetition of a tonic
chord in music. The opposite would be true of the contrast betw'een
red and green in Marvell's The Garden,
The form of the poem is the same whether it is studied as narra-
tive or as meaning, hence the structure of imagery in Macbeth
may be studied as a pattern derived from the text, or as a rhythm
of repetition falling on an audience's ear. There is a vague notion
that the latter method produces a simpler result, and may therefore
be used as a commonsense corrective to the niggling subtleties of
textual study. The analogy of music again may be helpful. The
average audience at a symphony knows very little about sonata
form, and misses practically all the subtleties detected by an
analysis of the score; yet those subtleties are really there, and as
the audience can hear everything that is being played, it gets them
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
all as part of a linear experience; the awareness is less conscious,
but not less real. The same is true of the response to the imagery
of a highly concentrated poetic drama.
The analysis of recurrent imagery is, of course, one of the chief
techniques of rhetorical or '‘new” criticism as well: the difference
is that formal criticism, after attaching the imagery to the central
form of the poem, renders an aspect of the form into the proposi-
tions of discursive writing. Formal criticism, in other words, is
commentary, and commentary is the process of translating into
explicit or discursive language what is implicit in the poem. Good
commentary naturally does not read ideas into the poem; it reads
and translates what is there, and the evidence that it is there is
offered by the study of the structure of imagery with which it
begins. The sense of tact, of the desirability of not pushing a point
of interpretation "too far,” is derived from the fact that the pro-
portioning of emphasis in criticism should normally bear a rough
analogy to the proportioning of emphasis in the poem.
The failure to make, in practice, the most elementary of all dis-
tinctions in literature, the distinction between fiction and fact,
hypothesis and assertion, imaginative and discursive writing, pro-
duces what in criticism has been called the "intentional fallacy,”
the notion that the poet has a primary intention of conveying
meaning to a reader, and that the first duty of a critic is to re-
capture that intention. The word intention is analogical: it implies
a relation between two things, usually a conception and an act.
Some related terms show this duality even more clearly: to "aim
at” something means that a target and a missile are being brought
into alignment. Hence such terms properly belong only to discursive
writing, where the correspondence of a verbal pattern with what
it describes is of primary importance. But a poet's primary concern
is to produce a work of art, and hence his intention can only be
expressed by some kind of tautology.
In other words, a poet's intention is centripetally directed. It is
directed towards putting words together, not towards aligning
words with meanings. If we had the privilege of Gulliver in Glubb-
dubdrib to call up the ghost of, say, Shakespeare, to ask him
what he meant by such and such a passage, we could only get,
with maddening iteration, the same answer: "I meant it to form
part of the play/' One may pursue the centripetal intention as far
as genre, as a poet intends to produce, not simply a poem, but a
86
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
certain kind of poem. In reading, for instance, Zuleika Dobson as a
description of life in Oxford, we should be well advised to allow
for ironic intention. One has to assume, as an essential heuristic
axiom, that the work as produced constitutes the definitive record
of the writer's intention. For many of the flaws which an inex-
perienced critic thinks he detects, the answer '‘But it's supposed
to be that way" is sufficient. All other statements of intention,
however fully documented, are suspect. The poet may change his
mind or mood; he may have intended one thing and done another,
and then rationalized what he did. (A cartoon in a New Yorker
of some years back hit off this last problem beautifully; it depicted
a sculptor gazing at a statue he had just made and remarking to a
friend: “Yes, the head is too large. When I put it in exhibition I
shall call it The Woman with the Large Head.' ") If intention is
still thought to be apparent in the poem itself, the poem is being
regarded as incomplete, like a freshman's essay where the reader
has continually to speculate about what the author may have had
in his mind. If the author has been dead for centuries, such specu-
lation cannot get us very far, however irresistibly it may suggest
itself.
What the poet meant to say, then, is, literally, the poem itself;
what he meant to say in any given passage is, in its literal meaning,
part of the poem. But literal meaning, we have seen, is variable and
ambiguous. The reader may be dissatisfied with the ghost of Shake-
speare's answer: he may feel that Shakespeare, unlike, say, Mal-
larme, is a poet he can trust, and that he also meant his passage to
be intelligible in itself (i.e,, have descriptive or rephrasable mean-
ing), Doubtless he did, but the relationship of the passage to the
rest of the play creates myriads of new meanings for it. Just as a
vivid sketch of a cat by a good draughtsman may contain in a few
crisp lines the entire feline experience of everyone who looks at it,
so the powerfully constructed pattern of words that we know as
Hamlet may contain an amount of meaning which the vast and
constantly growing library of criticism on the play cannot begin
to exhaust. Commentary, which translates the implicit into the
explicit, can only isolate the aspect of meaning, large or small,
which is appropriate or interesting for certain readers to grasp at a
certain time. Such translation is an activity with which the poet
has very little to do. The relation in bulk betvieen commentary and
a sacred book, such as the Bible or the Vedic hymns, is even more
87
SECOND ESSAY; ETHICAL CRITICISM
Striking, and indicates that when a poetic structure attains a certain
degree of concentration or social recognition, the amount of com-
mentary it will carry is infinite. This fact is in itself no more in-
credible than the fact that a scientist can state a law illustrated by
more phenomena than he could ever observe or count, and there
is no occasion for wondering, like the yokels in Goldsmith, how
one small poet’s head can carry the amount of wit, wisdom, in-
struction, and significance that Shakespeare and Dante have given
the world.
Still there is a genuine mystery in art, and a real place for wonder.
In Sartor Resartus Carlyle distinguishes extrinsic symbols, like the
cross or the national flag, which are without value in themselves
but are signs or indicators of something existential, from intrinsic
symbols, which include works of art. On this basis we may dis-
tinguish two kinds of mystery. (A third kind, the mystery which
is a puzzle, a problem to be solved and annihilated, belongs to dis-
cursive thought, and has little to do with the arts, except in matters
of technique.) The mystery of the unknown or unknowable essence
is an extrinsic mystery, which involves art only when art is also made
illustrative of something else, as religious art is to the person con-
cerned primarily with worship. But the intrinsic mystery is that
which remains a mystery in itself no matter how fully known it is,
and hence is not a mystery separated from what is known. The
mystery in the greatness of King Lear or Macbeth comes not from
concealment but from revelation, not from something unknown
or unknowable in the work, but from something unlimited in it.
It could be said, of course, that poetry is the product, not only
of a deliberate and voluntary act of consciousness, like discursive
writing, but of processes which are subconscious or preconscious
or half-conscious or unconscious as well, whatever psychological
metaphor one prefers. It takes a great deal of will power to write
poetry, but part of that will power must be employed in trying to
relax the will, so making a large part of one’s writing involuntary.
This is no doubt true, and it is also true that poetic technique, like
all technique, is a habitual, and therefore an increasingly uncon-
scious, skill. But I feel that literary data are in the long run only
explicable within criticism, and I am reluctant to explain literary
facts by psychological cliches. Still, it seems now almost impossible
to avoid the term “creative,” with all the biological analogies it
suggests, when speaking of the arts. And creation, whether of God,
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
man, or nature, seems to be an activity whose only intention is to
abolish intention, to eliminate final dependence on or relation to
something else, to destroy the shadow that falls between itself
and its conception.
One wishes that literar^^ criticism had a Samuel Butler to formu-
late some of the paradoxes involved in this parallel between the
work of art and the organism. We can describe objectively what
happens when a tulip blooms in spring and a chrysanthemum in
autumn, but we cannot describe it from the inside of the plant, ex-
cept by metaphors derived from human consciousness and ascribed
to some agent like God or nature or environment or Man vital,
or to the plant itself. It is projected metaphor to say that a flower
'‘knows” when it is time for it to bloom, and of course to say that
“nature knows” is merely to import a faded mother-goddess cult
into biology. I can well understand that in their own field biologists
would find such teleological metaphors both unnecessary and con-
fusing, a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The same would be true
of criticism to the extent that criticism has to deal with impondera-
bles other than consciousness or logically directed will. If one
critic says that another has discovered a mass of subtleties in a
poet of which that poet was probably quite unconscious, the phrase
points up the biological analogy. A snowflake is probably quite
unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth
study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
It is not often realized that all commentary is allegorical inter-
pretation, an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery.
The instant that any critic permits himself to make a genuine com-
ment about a poem (e.g., “In Hamlet Shakespeare appears to be
portraying the tragedy of irresolution”) he has begun to allegorize.
Commentary thus looks at literature as, in its formal phase, a
potential allegory of events and ideas. The relation of such com-
mentary to poetry itself is the source of the contrast which was
developed by several critics of the Romantic period between “sym-
bolism” and “allegory,” symbolism here being used in the sen^
of thematically significant imagery. The contrast is between a “con-
crete” approach to symbols which begins with images of actual
things and works outward to ideas and propositions, and an “ab-
stract” approach which begins with the idea and then tries to find
a concrete image to represent it. This distinction is valid enough
89
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
in itself, but it has deposited a large terminal moraine of confusion
in modern criticism, largely because the term allegory is very loosely
employed for a great variety of literary phenomena.
We have actual allegory w'hen a poet explicitly indicates the
relationship of his images to examples and precepts, and so tries
to indicate how a commentary on him should proceed. A writer
is being allegorical whenever it is clear that he is saying “by this I
also (alios) mean that.” If this seems to be done continuously, we
may say, cautiously, that what he is writing “is” an allegory. In
The Faerie Queene, for instance, the narrative systematically refers
to historical examples and the meaning to moral precepts, besides
doing their own work in the poem. Allegory, then, is a contrapuntal
technique, like canonical imitation in music. Dante, Spenser, Tasso,
and Bunyan use it throughout: their works are the masses and
oratorios of literature. Ariosto, Goethe, Ibsen, Hawthorne write in
a freistimmige style in which allegory may be picked up and
dropped again at pleasure. But even continuous allegory is still
a structure of images, not of disguised ideas, and commentary has
to proceed with it exactly as it does with all other literature, trying
to see what precepts and examples are suggested by the imagery
as a whole.
The commenting critic is often prejudiced against allegory with-
out knowing the real reason, which is that continuous allegory
prescribes the direction of his commentary, and so restricts its
freedom. Hence he often urges us to read Spenser and Bunyan,
for example, for the story alone and let the allegory go, meaning
by that that he regards his own type of commentary as more inter-
esting. Or else he will frame a definition of allegory that will exclude
the poems he likes. Such a critic is often apt to treat all allegory
as though it were naive allegory, or the translation of ideas into
images.
Naive allegory is a disguised form of discursive writing, and
belongs chiefly to educational literature on an elementary level:
schoolroom moralities, devotional exempla, local pageants, and
the like. Its basis is the habitual or customary ideas fostered by
education and ritual, and its normal form is that of transient
spectacle. Under the excitement of a particular occasion familiar
ideas suddenly become sense experiences, and vanish with the
occasion. The defeat of Sedition and Discord by Sound Govern-
ment and Encouragement of Trade would be the right sort of
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
theme for a pageant designed only to entertain a visiting monarch
for half an hour. The apparatus of “mass media’' and '‘audiovisual
aids” plays a similar allegorical role in contemporary education.
Because of this basis in spectacle, naive allegory has its center of
gravity in the pictorial arts, and is most successful as art when
recognized to be a form of occasional wit, as it is in the political
cartoon. The more solemn and permanent naive allegories of ofhcial
murals and statuary show a marked tendency to date.
At one extreme of commentary, then, there is the naive allegory
so anxious to make its own allegorical points that it has no real
literary or hypothetical center. When I say that naive allegory
“dates,” I mean that any allegory which resists a primary analysis
of imagery— that is, an allegory which is simply discursive writing
with an illustrative image or two stuck into it— will have to be
treated less as literature than as a document in the history of ideas.
When the author of II Esdras, for instance, introduces an alle-
gorical vision of an eagle, and then says, “Behold, on the right
side there arose one feather, which reigned over all the earth,” it
is clear that he is not sufficiently interested in his eagle as a poetic
image to remain within the normal boundaries of literary expres-
sion. The basis of poetic expression is the metaphor, and the basis
of naive allegory is the mixed metaphor.
Within the boundaries of literature we find a kind of sliding
scale, ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with
being literature at all, at one extreme, to the most elusive, anti-
explicit and anti-allegorical at the other. First we meet the con-
tinuous allegories, like The Pilgnm's Progress and The Faerie
Queene, and then the free-style allegories just mentioned. Next
come the poetic structures with a large and insistent doctrinal
interest, in which the internal fictions are exempla, like the epics
of Milton. Then we have, in the exact center, works in which the
structure of imagery, however suggestive, has an implicit relation
only to events and ideas, and which includes the bulk of Shake-
speare. Below this, poetic imagery begins to recede from example
and precept and become increasingly ironic and paradoxical. Here
the modern critic begins to feel more at home, the reason being
that this type is more consistent with the modern literal view of
art, the sense of the poem as withdrawn from explicit statement.
Several types of this ironic and anti-allegorical imagery are fa-
miliar. One is the typical symbol of the metaphysical school of the
9 ^
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
Baroque period, the “conceit” or deliberately strained union of
normally disparate things. Tlie paradoxical techniques of meta-
physical poetry are based on a sense of the breakdown of the in-
ternal relation of art and nature into an external one. Another is
the substitute-image of symbolisme, part of a technique for suggest-
ing or evoking things and avoiding the explicit naming of them. Still
another is the kind of image described by Mr. Eliot as an objective
correlative, the image that sets up an inward focus of emotion in
poetry and at the same time substitutes itself for an idea. Still
another, closely related to if not identical with the objective cor-
relative, is the heraldic symbol, the central emblematic image which
comes most readily to mind when we think of the word “symbol”
in modern literature. We think, for example, of Hawthorne's
scarlet letter, Melville’s white whale, James’s golden bowl, or Vir-
ginia Woolf’s lighthouse. Such an image differs from the image of
the formal allegory in that there is no continuous relationship be-
tween art and nature. In contrast to the allegorical symbols of
Spenser, for instance, the heraldic emblematic image is in a para-
doxical and ironic relation to both narrative and meaning. As a unit
of meaning, it arrests the narrative; as a unit of narrative, it per-
plexes the meaning. It combines the qualities of Carlyle’s intrinsic
symbol with significance in itself, and the extrinsic symbol which
points quizzically to something else. It is a technique of symbolism
which is based on a strong sense of a lurking antagonism between
the literal and the descriptive aspects of symbols, the same antago-
nism that made Mallarmd and Zola so extreme a contrast in nine-
teenth-century literature.
Below this we run into still more indirect techniques, such as
private association, symbolism intended not to be fully understood,
the deliberate spoofing of Dadaism, and kindred signs of another
approaching boundary of literary expression. We should try to keep
this whole range of possible commentary clearly in mind, so as to
correct the perspective both of the medieval and Renaissance critics
who assumed that all major poetry should be treated as far as
possible as continuous allegory, and of the modern ones who
maintain that poetry is essentially anti-allegorical and paradoxical.
What we have now is a conception of literature as a body of
hypothetical creations which is not necessarily involved in the
worlds of truth and fact, nor necessarily withdrawn from them.
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
but which may enter into any kind of relationship to them, rang-
ing from the most to the least explicit. We are strongly reminded
of the relationship of mathematics to the natural sciences. Mathe-
matics, like literature, proceeds hypothetically and by internal
consistency, not descriptively and by outward fidelity to nature.
When it is applied to external facts, it is not its truth but its ap-
plicability that is being verified. As I seem to have fastened on the
cat for my semantic emblem in this essay, I note that this point
comes out sharply in the discussion between Yeats and Sturge
Moore over the problem of Ruskin's cat, the animal that was
picked up and flung out of a window by Ruskin although it was
not there. Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality
has to fall back on an axiom of faith. The distinction between an
empirical fact and an illusion is not a rational distinction, and
cannot be logically proved. It is ''proved'" only by the practical
and emotional necessity of assuming the distinction. For the poet,
qua poet, this necessity does not exist, and there is no poetic reason
why he should either assert or deny the existence of any cat, real
or Ruskinian.
The conception of art as having a relation to reality which is
neither direct nor negative, but potential, finally resolves the di-
chotomy between delight and instruction, the style and the mes-
sage. “Delight" is not readily distinguishable from pleasure, and
hence opens the way to that aesthetic hedonism we glanced at in
the introduction, the failure to distinguish personal and impersonal
aspects of valuation. The traditional theory of catharsis implies
that the emotional response to art is not the raising of an actual
emotion, but the raising and casting out of actual emotion on a
wave of something else. We may call this something else, perhaps,
exhilaration or exuberance: the vision of something liberated from
experience, the response kindled in the reader by the transmuta-
tion of experience into mimesis, of life into art, of routine into
play. At the center of liberal education something surely ought to
get liberated. The metaphor of creation suggests the parallel image
of birth, the emergence of a new-born organism into independent
life. The ecstasy of creation and its response produce, on one level
of creative effort, the hen's cackle; on another, the quality that the
Italian critics called spTexmtura and that Hoby's translation of
Castiglione calls “recklessness," the sense of buoyancy or release
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
that accompanies perfect discipline, when we can no longer know
the dancer from the dance.
It is impossible to understand the effect of what Milton called
''gorgeous Tragedy” as producing a real emotion of gloom or sor-
row. Aeschylus's The Persians and Shakespeare's Macbeth are cer-
tainly tragedies, but they are associated respectively- with the victory
of Salamis and the accession of James I, both occasions of national
rejoicing. Some critics carry the theory of real emotion over into
Shakespeare himself, and talk about a "tragic period,” in which
he is supposed to have felt dismal from 1600 to 1608. Most people,
if they had just finished writing a play as good as King Lear,
would be in a mood of exhilaration, and while we have no right
to ascribe this mood to Shakespeare, it is surely the right way to
describe our response to the play. On the other hand, it comes
as something of a shock to realize that the blinding of Gloucester
is primarily entertainment, the more so as the pleasure we get from
it obviously has nothing to do with sadism. If any literary work is
emotionally "depressing,” there is something wrong with either
the writing or the reader's response. Art seems to produce a kind of
buoyancy which, though often called pleasure, as it is for instance
by Wordsworth, is something more inclusive than pleasure. "Ex-
uberance is beauty,” said Blake. That seems to me a practically
definitive solution, not only of the minor question of what beauty
is, but of the far more important problem of what the conceptions
of catharsis and ecstasis really mean.
Such exuberance is, of course, as much intellectual as it is emo-
tional: Blake himself was willing to define poetry as "allegory ad-
dressed to the intellectual powers.” We live in a world of threefold
external compulsion: of compulsion on action, or law; of com-
pulsion on thinking, or fact; of compulsion on feeling, which is
the characteristic of all pleasure whether it is produced by the
Paradise or by an ice cream soda. But in the world of imagination
a fourth power, which contains morality, beauty, and truth but
is never subordinated to them, rises free of all their compulsions.
The work of imagination presents us with a vision, not of the per-
sonal greatness of the poet, but of something impersonal and far
greater: the vision of a decisive act of spiritual freedom, the vision
of the recreation of man.
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
MYTHICAL PHASE: SYMBOL AS ARCHETYPE
In the formal phase the poem belongs neither to the class ''art/'
nor to the class "verbal" : it represents its own class. There are thus
two aspects to its form. In the first place, it is unique, a techne or
artifact, with its own peculiar structure of imagery^ to be examined
by itself without immediate reference to other things like it. The
critic here begins with poems, not with a prior conception or
definition of poetry. In the second place, the poem is one of a
class of similar forms. Aristotle knows that Oedipus Tyrannus is in
one sense not like any other tragedy, but he also knows that it be-
longs to the class called tragedy. We, who have experienced Shake-
speare and Racine, can add the corollary that tragedy is something
bigger than a phase of Greek drama. We may also find tragedy in
literary works which are not dramas. To understand what tragedy
is, therefore, takes us beyond the merely historical into the question
of what an aspect of literature as a whole is. With this idea of
the external relations of a poem with other poems, two considera-
tions in criticism for the first time become important: convention
and genre.
The study of genres is based on analogies in form. It is charac-
teristic of documentary and historical criticism that it cannot deal
with such analogies. It can trace influence with great plausibility,
whether it exists or not, but confronted with a tragedy of Shake-
speare and a tragedy of Sophocles, to be compared solely because
they are both tragedies, the historical critic has to confine himself
to general reflections about the seriousness of life. Similarly, nothing
is more striking in rhetorical criticism than the absence of any
consideration of genre: the rhetorical critic analyzes what is in
front of him without much regard to whether it is a play, a lyric,
or a novel. He may in fact even assert that there are no genres in
literature. That is l^cause he is concerned with his structure simply
as a work of art, not as an artifact with a possible function. But
there are many analogies in literature apart altogether from sources
and influences (many of which, of course, are not analogous at
all) and noticing such analogies forms a large part of our actual
experience of literature, whatever its role so far in criticism.
The central principle of the formal phase, that a poem is an imi-
tation of nature, is, though a perfectly sound one, still a principle
which isolates the individual poem. And it is clear that any poem
may be examined, not only as an imitation of nature, but as an
95
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
imitation of other poems. Virgil discovered, according to Pope, that
following nature was ultimately the same thing as following Homer.
Once we think of a poem in relation to other poems, as a unit
of poetry, we can see that the study of genres has to be founded
on the study of convention. The criticism which can deal with
such matters will have to be based on that aspect of symbolism
which relates poems to oneanother, and it will choose, as its main
field of operations, the symbols that link poems together. Its
ultimate object is to consider, not simply a poem as an imitation
of nature, but the order of nature as a whole as imitated by a
corresponding order of words.
All art is equally conventionalized, but we do not ordinarily
notice this fact unless we are unaccustomed to the convention. In
our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately dis-
guised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is
an invention distinctive enough to be patented. Hence the conven-
tionalizing forces of modern literature— the way, for instance, that
an editor's policy and the expectation of his readers combine to
conventionalize what appears in a magazine— often go unrecognized.
Demonstrating the debt of A to B is merely scholarship if A is dead,
but a proof of moral delinquency if A is alive. This state of things
makes it difficult to appraise a literature which includes Chaucer,
much of whose poetry is translated or paraphrased from others;
Shakespeare, whose plays sometimes follow their sources almost
verbatim; and Milton, who asked for nothing better than to steal
as much as possible out of the Bible. It is not only the inexperi-
enced reader who looks for a residual originality in such works.
Most of us tend to think of a poet's real achievement as distinct
from, or even contrasted with, the achievement present in what
he stole, and we are thus apt to concentrate on peripheral rather
than on central critical facts. For instance, the central greatness
of Paradise Regained, as a poem, is not the greatness of the rhe-
torical decorations that Milton added to his source, but the great-
ness of the theme itself, which Milton passes on to the reader from
his source. This conception of the great poet's being entrusted with
the great theme was elementary enough to Milton, but violates
most of the low mimetic prejuffices about creation that most of
us are educated in.
The underestimating of convention appears to be a result of,
may even be a pait of, the tendency, marked from Romantic times
96
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
on, to think of the individual as ideally prior to his societ\^ The
view opposed to this, that the new baby is conditioned by a heredi-
tary and environmental kinship to a society which already exists,
has, whatever doctrines may be inferred from it, the initial ad-
vantage of being closer to the facts it deals with. The literary con-
sequence of the second view is that the new poem, like the new
baby, is born into an already existing order of words, and is typical
of the structure of poetry to which it is attached. The new baby is
his own society appearing once again as a unit of individuality, and
the new poem has a similar relation to its poetic society.
It is hardly possible to accept a critical view which confuses the
original with the aboriginal, and imagines that a '^creative'' poet
sits down with a pencil and some blank paper and eventually pro-
duces a new poem in a special act of creation ex nihilo. Human
beings do not create in that way. Just as a new scientific discovery
manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature,
and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of
the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that
was already latent in the order of words. Literature may have life,
reality, experience, nature, imaginative truth, social conditions,
or what you will for its content; but literature itself is not made out
of these things. Poetry can only be made out of other poems;
novels out of other novels. Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped
externally: the forms of literature can no more exist outside litera-
ture than the forms of sonata and fugue and rondo can exist outside
music.
All this was much clearer before the assimilation of literature
to private enterprise concealed so many of the facts of criticism.
When Milton sat down to write a poem about Edward King, he
did not ask himself: *'What can I find to say about King?” but
"'How does poetry require that such a subject should be treated?”
The notion that convention shows a lack of feeling, and that a
poet attains “sincerity” (which usually means articulate emotion)
by disregarding it, is opposed to all the facts of literary experience
and history. The origin of this notion is, again, the view that
poetry is a description of emotion, and that its ""literal” meaning
is an assertion about the emotions held by the individual poet.
But any serious study of literature soon shows that the real dif-
ference between the original and the imitative poet is simply that
the former is more profoundly imitative. Originality returns to the
97
SECOND essay: ethical criticism
origins of literature, as radicalism returns to its roots. The remark
of Mr. Eliot that a good poet is more likely to steal than to imitate
affords a more balanced view of convention, as it indicates that the
poem is specifically involved with other poems, not vaguely with
such abstractions as tradition or style. The copyright law, and
the mores attached to it, make it difficult for a modern novelist to
steal anything except his title from the rest of literature: hence it
is often only in such titles as For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Grapes
of Wrath, or The Sound and the Fury, that we can clearly see how
much impersonal dignity and richness of association an author
can gain by the communism of convention.
As with other products of divine activity, the father of a poem
is much more difficult to identify than the mother. That the
mother is always nature, the realm of the objective considered as
a field of communication, no serious criticism can ever deny. But
as long as the father of a poem is assumed to be the poet himself,
we have once again failed to distinguish literature from discursive
verbal structures. The discursive writer writes as an act of conscious
will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he
employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing.
But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not
the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately
still, the womb of Mother Nature herself: her privates he, so to
speak. The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make
changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because
they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the
poem as it passes through his mind. He is responsible for delivering
it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is
equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from
all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.
The true father or shaping spirit of the poem is the form of the
poem itself, and this form is a manifestation of the universal spirit
of poetry, the **onlie begetter” of Shakespeare's sonnets who was
not Shakespeare himself, much less that depressing ghost Mr.
W. H., but Shakespeare's subject, the master-mistress of his pas-
sion. When a poet speaks of the internal spirit which shapes the
poem, he is apt to drop the traditional appeal to female Muses
and think of himself as in a feminine, or at least receptive, rela-
tion to some god or lord, whether Apollo, Dionysus, Eros, Christ,
or (as in Milton) the Holy Spirit. Est deus in nobis, Ovid says:
98
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
in modern times we may compare Nietzsche's remarks about his
inspiration in Ecce Homo.
The problem of convention is the problem of how art can be
communicable, for literature is clearly as much a technique of
communication as assertive verbal structures are. Poetry, taken as
a whole, is no longer simply an aggregate of artifacts imitating
nature, but one of the activities of human artifice taken as a whole.
If we may use the word ''civilization" for this, we may say that our
fourth phase looks at poetry as one of the techniques of civiliza-
tion. It is concerned, therefore, with the social aspect of poetry,
with poetry as the focus of a community. The symbol in this phase
is the communicable unit, to which I give the name archetype:
that is, a typical or recurring image. I mean by an archetype a
symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps
to unify and integrate our literary experience. And as the archetype
is the communicable symbol, archetypal criticism is primarily con-
cerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communica-
tion. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit
poems into the body of poetry as a whole.
The repetition of certain common images of physical nature like
the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be
called even "coincidence," which is the name we give to a piece
of design when we cannot find a use for it. But it does indicate a
certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates, and in the com-
municating activity of which poetry forms part. Because of the
larger communicative context of education, it is possible for a story
about the sea to be archetypal, to make a profound imaginative
impact, on a reader who has never been out of Saskatchewan. And
when pastoral images are deliberately employed in Lycidas, for
instance, merely because they are conventional, we can see that the
convention of the pastoral makes us assimilate these images to
other parts of literary experience.
We think first of the pastoral's descent from Theocritus, where
the pastoral elegy first appears as a literary adaptation of the ritual
of the Adonis lament, and through Theocritus to Virgil and the
whole pastoral tradition to The Shepheardes Calender and beyond
to Lycidas itself. Then we think of the intricate pastoral symbolism
of the Bible and the Christian Church, of Abel and the twenty-third
Psalm and Christ the Good Shepherd, of the ecclesiastical over-
tones of "pastor” and "flock,” and of the link between the Classical
99
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
and Christian traditions in VirgiFs Messianic Eclogue. Then we
think of the extensions of pastoral symbolism into Sidney’s Arcadia,
The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s forest comedies, and the like;
then of the post-Miltonic development of pastoral elegy in Shelley,
Arnold, Whitman, and Dylan Thomas; perhaps too of pastoral
conventions in painting and music. In short, we can get a whole
liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and
following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature.
An avowedly conventional poem like Lycidas urgently demands
the kind of criticism that will absorb it into the study of literature
as a whole, and this activity is expected to begin at once, with the
first cultivated reader. Here we have a situation in literature more
like that of mathematics or science, where the work of genius is as-
similated to the whole subject so quickly that one hardly notices
the difference between creative and critical activity.
If we do not accept the archetypal or conventional element in
the imagery that links one poem with another, it is impossible to
get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature
alone. But if we add to our desire to know literature a desire to
know how we know it, we shall find that expanding images into
conventional archetypes of literature is a process that takes place
unconsciously in all our reading. A symbol like the sea or the
heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to ex-
pand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as
a whole. Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville’s novel: he is ab-
sorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons
of the deep from the Old Testament onward. And what is true
for the reader is a fortiori true of the poet, who learns very quickly
that there is no singing school for his soul except the study of the
monuments of its own magnificence.
In each phase of symbolism there is a point at which the critic
is compelled to break away from the range of the poet’s own knowl-
edge. Thus the historical or documentary critic has sooner or later
to call Dante a ''medieval” poet, a notion unknown and unin-
telligible to Dante. In archetypal criticism, the poet’s conscious
knowledge is considered only so far as the poet may allude to or
imitate other poets ("sources”) or make a deliberate use of a
convention. Beyond that, the poet’s control over his poem stops
with the poem. Only the archetypal critic can be concerned with
its relationship to the rest of literature. But here again we have
lOO
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
to distinguish between explicitly conventionalized literature, such
as LycidaSj where the poet himself starts us off by referring to
Theocritus, Virgil, Renaissance pastoralists, and the Bible, and
literature which conceals or ignores its conventional links. The
conception of copyright and the revolutionary nature of the low
mimetic view of creation also extends to a general unwillingness
on the part of authors of the copyright age to have their imagery
studied conventionally, and in dealing with this period, most arche-
types have to be established by critical inspection alone.
To give a random example, one very common convention of the
nineteenth'Century novel is the use of two heroines, one dark and
one light. The dark one is as a rule passionate, haughty, plain,
foreign or Jewish, and in some way associated with the undesirable
or with some kind of forbidden fruit like incest. When the two
are involved with the same hero, the plot usually has to get rid
of the dark one or make her into a sister if the story is to end
happily. Examples include Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans j
The Woman in White, Ligeia, Pierre (a tragedy because the hero
chooses the dark girl, who is also his sister), The Marble Faun, and
countless incidental treatments. A male version forms the symbolic
basis of Wuthering Heights. This device is as much a convention
as Milton's calling Edward King by a name out of Virgil's Eclogues,
but it shows a confused, or, as we say, "'unconscious" approach to
conventions. Again, when we meet the images of a man, a woman,
and a serpent in the ninth book of Paradise Lost, there is no doubt
of their conventional links with similar figures in the Book of
Genesis. In Hudson's Green Mansions the hero and heroine first
meet over a serpent in a quasi-Paradisal setting: here the conven-
tional nature of the imagery is a matter on which the author gives
us no help. When a critic meets St. George the Redcross Knight
in Spenser, bearing a red cross on a white ground, he has some
idea what to do with this figure. When he meets a female in Henry
James's The Other House called Rose Armiger with a white dress
and a red parasol, he is, in the current slang, clueless. It is clear
that a deficiency in contemporary education often complained of,
the disappearance of a common cultural ground which makes a
modern poet's allusions to the Bible or to Classical mythology fall
with less weight than they should, has much to do with the decline
in the explicit use of archetypes.
Whitman, as is well known, was a spokesman of an anti-
lOl
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
archetypal view of literature, and urged the Muse to forget the
matter of Troy and develop new themes. This is a low mimetic
prejudice, and is consequently appropriate enough for Whitman,
who is both right and wrong. He is wrong because the matter of
Troy will always be, in the foreseeable future, an integral part of
the Western cultural heritage, and hence references to Agamemnon
in Yeats's Leda or Eliot's Sweeney among the Nightingales have as
much cumulative power as ever for the properly instructed reader.
But he is of course perfectly right in feeling that the content of
poetry is normally an immediate and contemporar}' environment.
He was right, being the kind of poet he was, in making the content
of his own When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed an elegy
on Lincoln and not a conventional Adonis lament. Yet his elegy
is, in its form, as conventional as Lycidas, complete with purple
flowers thrown on coffins, a great star drooping in the west, imagery
of ''ever-returning spring" and all the rest of it. Poetry organizes
the content of the world as it passes before the poet, but the forms
in which that content is organized come out of the structure of
poetry itself.
Archetypes are associative clusters, and differ from signs in being
complex variables. Within the complex is often a large rfuir^]^
specific learned associations which are communicable because a
.large num^r of people in A..giveiLXulture h^^ to be familiar
with tKem. When we speak of "symbolism" in b^imaryTife^^e
usuaT^ThTnk of such learned cultural archetypes as the cross or
the crown, or of conventional associations, as of white with purity
or green with jealousy. As an arche type^. green may svmboIize..hope
o r vegetable n^ umLE^^imia M Irish
certain nolpr. Some archetypes are so deeply rooted in conventional
association that they can hardly avoid suggesting that association,
as the geometrical figure of the cross inevitably suggests the death
of Christ. Acomf Zefefy conyen^^
which the archetypes^ of communicable mn its^ were Lesis eiLfcially a
S^j5£ ^oteric^ signs. ^ T^is can happen in the arts—for instance in
some of the sacred dances of India— but it has not happened in
Western literature yet, and the resistance of modern writers to
having their archetypes "spotted," so to speak, is due to a natural
anxiety to keep them as versatile as possible, not pinned down ex-
clusively to one interpretation. A poet may be showing an esoteric
102
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
tendency if he specifically points out one association, as Yeats does
in his footnotes to some of his early poems. There are no necessary
associations: there are some exceedingly obvious ones, such as the
association of darkness with terror or mystery, but there are no
intrinsic or inherent correspondences which must invariably be
present. As we shall see later, there is a context in which the phrase
''universal symbor' makes sense, but it is not this context. The
stream of literature, however, like any other stream, seeks the easiest
channels first: the poet who uses the expected associations will
communicate more rapidly.
At one extreme of literature we have the pure convention, which
a poet uses merely because it has often been used before in the
same way. This is most frequent in naive poetry, in the fixed epi-
thets and phrase-tags of medieval romance and ballad, in the in-
variable plots and character types of naive drama, and, to a lesser
degree, in the topoi or rhetorical commonplaces which, like other
ideas in literature, are so dull when stated as propositions, and so
rich and variegated when they are used as structural principles in
literature. At the other extreme we have the pure variable, where
there is a deliberate attempt at novelty or unfamiliarity, and con-
sequently a disguising or complicating of archetypes. Such tech-
niques come very close to a distrust of communication itself as a
function of literature. However, extremes meet, as Coleridge said,
and anti-conventional poetry soon becomes a convention in its
turn, to be explored by hardy scholars accustomed to the dreari-
ness of literary bad lands. Between these extreme points conven-
tions vary from the most explicit to the most indirect, along a scale
parallel to the scale of allegory and paradox already dealt with.
The two scales may be often confused or identified, but translating
imagery into examples and precepts is a quite distinct process from
following images into other poems.
Near the extreme of pure convention is translation, paraphrase,
and the kind of use which Chaucer makes of Boccaccio in Troilus
and The Knighfs Tde. Next we come to deliberate and explicit
convention, such as we have noted in Lycidas, Next comes para-
doxical or ironic convention, including parody—often a sign that
certain vogues in handling conventions are getting worn out. Then
comes the attempt to reach originality through turning one's back
on explicit convention, an attempt which results in implicit con-
vention of the kind we detected in Whitman. Then comes a tend-
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ency to identify originality with “experimentar" writing, based in
our day on an analogy with scientific discover}^, and which is fre-
quently spoken of as ''breaking with convention.” And, of course,
at every stage of literature, including this last one, there is a great
deal of superficial and inorganic convention, producing the kind
of writing that most students of literature prefer to keep in the
middle distance: run-of-the-mill Elizabethan sonnets and love lyrics,
Plautine comedy-formulas, eighteenth-century pastorals, nineteenth-
century happy-ending novels, works of followers and disciples and
schools and trends generally.
It is clear from all this that archetypes are most easily studied in
highly conventionalized literature: that is, for the most part, naive,
primitive, and popular literature. In suggesting the possibility of
archetypal criticism, then, I am suggesting the possibility of ex-
tending the kind of comparative and morphological study now
made of folk tales and ballads into the rest of literature. Tliis
should be more easily conceivable now that it is no longer fashiona-
ble to mark off popular and primitive literature from ordinary liter-
ature as sharply as we used to do. Also, we shall find that super-
ficial literature, of the kind just spoken of, is of great value to arche-
typal criticism simply because it is conventional. If throughout
this book I refer to popular fiction as frequently as to the greatest
novels and epics, it is for the same reason that a musician attempt-
ing to explain the rudimentary facts about counterpoint would be
more likely, at least at first, to illustrate from "Three Blind Mice”
than from a complex Bach fugue.
Every phase of symbolism has its particular approach to narrative
and to meaning. In the literal phase, narrative is a flow of significant
sounds, and meaning an ambiguous and complex verbal pattern.
In the descriptive phase, narrative is an imitation of real events,
and meaning an imitation of actual objects or propositions. In the
formal phase, poetry exists between the example and the precept.
In the exemplary event there is an element of recurrence; in the
precept, or statement about what ought to be, there is a strong ele-
ment of desire, or what is called "wish-thinking.” These elements
of recurrence and desire come into the foreground in archetypal
criticism, which studies poems as units of poetry as a whole and
symbols as units of communication.
From such a point of view, the narrative aspect of literature is
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
a recurrent act of symbolic communication: in other words a rituaL
Narrative is studied by the archetypal critic as ritual or imitation
of human action as a whole, and not simply as a mimesis praxeos
or imitation of an action. Similarly, in archetypal criticism the
significant content is the conflict of desire and reality which has
for its basis the work of the dream. Ritual and dream, therefore,
are the narrative and significant content respectively of literature
in its archetypal aspect. The archetypal analysis of the plot of a
novel or play would deal with it in terms of the generic, recurring,
or conventional actions which show analogies to rituals: the wed*
dings, funerals, intellectual and social initiations, executions or
mock executions, the chasing away of the scapegoat villain, and
so on. The archetypal analysis of the meaning or significance of
such a work would deal with it in terms of the generic, recurring,
or conventional shape indicated by its mood and resolution, whether
tragic, comic, ironic, or what not, in which the relationship of
desire and experience is expressed.
Recurrence and desire interpenetrate, and are equally important
in both ritual and dream. In its archetypal phase, the poem imi-
tates nature, not (as in the formal phase) nature as a structure or
system, but nature as a cyclical process. The principle of recurrence
in the rhythm of art seems to be derived from the repetitions in
nature that make time intelligible to us. Rituals cluster around the
cyclical movements of the sun, the moon, the seasons, and human
life. Every crucial periodicity of experience: dawn, sunset, the
phases of the moon, seed-time and harvest, the equinoxes and the
solstices, birth, initiation, marriage, and death, get rituals attached
to them. The pull of ritual is toward pure cyclical narrative, which,
if there could be such a thing, would be automatic and unconscious
repetition. In the middle of all this recurrence, however, is the
central recurrent cycle of sleeping and waking life, the daily frustra-
tion of the ego, the nightly awakening of a titanic self.
The archetypal critic studies the poem as pajrt of poetry, and.
~ ^ at liuman imitation of nature that w^^
is n^nierdy an^^
total human for m out ot nature, and it is
lat we have just called cjesSe/ l^
for food and shelter is not content with roots and caves: it produces
the human forms of nature that we call farming and architecture.
Desire is thus not a simple re^nse to need,^or_ai3*-aftimal may
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
need food without planting a garden to get it, nor is it a simple
response to want, or desire for something in particular. It is neither
limited to nor satisfied by objects, but is the energy that leads
human society to develop its own form. Desire in this sense is the
ggial^a^ect^ we iiielLQiT^the^jtexaJ level as emotion, ^an
impulse toward expression which would have remained amorphous
£ihe-poein hgd not liberated it by providing the iomujLit5_5S
pression. The form of desire, similarly, is liberated and made ap-
parent by civilization. The efficient cause of civilization is work,
and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as
a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of work and the forms of
desire.
There is however a moral dialectic in desire,. The CQpception of a
garden develops the conception **weed,^ and building a sheepfoTd
makes^ the wolf a greater enemy,„Poetry in its social or archetypal
aspect, therefore, not only tries to illustrate the fulfilment of desire,
but to define the obstacles to it. Ritual is not only a recurrent act,
but an act expressive of a dialectic of desire and repugnance: desire
for fertility or victory, repugnance to drought or to enemies. We
have rituals of social integration, and we have rituals of expulsion,
execution, and punishment. In dream there is a parallel dialectic,
as there is both the wish-fulfilment dream and the anxiety or night-
mare dream of repugnance. Archetypal criticism, therefore, rests
on two organizing rhythms or patterns, one cyclical, the other
dialectic.
The union of ritual and dream in a form of verbal communica-
tion is myth. This is a sense of the term myth slightly different
from that used in the previous essay. But, first, the sense is equally
familiar, and the ambiguity not ihine but the dictionary's; and,
second, there is a real connection between the two senses which will
become more apparent as we go on. The myth accounts for, and
makes communicable, the ritual and the dream. Ritual, by itself,
cannot account for itself: it is pre-logical, pre-verbal, and in a sense
pre-human. Its attachment to the calendar seems to link human
life to the biological dependence on the natural cycle which plants,
and to some extent animals, still have. Everything in nature that
we think of as having some analogy with works of art, like the
flower or the bird's song, grows out of a synchronization between
an organism and the rhythms of its natural environment, especially
that of the solar year. With animals some expressions of syn-
106
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
chronization, like the mating dances of birds, could almost be
called rituals. Myth is more distinctively human, as the most in-
telligent partridge cannot tell even the most absurd storv explain-
ing why it drums in the mating season. Similarly, the dream, by
itself, is a system of cryptic allusions to the dreamer's own life,
not fully understood by him, or so far as we know of any real use
to him. But in all dreams there is a mythical element which has
a power of independent communication, as is obvious, not only
in the stock example of Oedipus, but in any collection of folk
tales. Myth, therefore, not only gives meaning to ritual and narra-
tive to dream: it is the identification of ritual and dream, in which
the former is seen to be the latter in movement. This would not be
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ture most deeply influenced by the archetypal phase of symbolism
impresses us as primitive and popular.
By these words I mean possessing the ability to communicate
in time and space respectively. Otherwise they mean much the
same thing. Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the culti-
vated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience
as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the
softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become inter-
ested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the
primitive. This sense of the archaic recurs whenever we find great
art using popular forms, as Shakespeare does in his last period, or
as the Bible does when it ends in a fairy tale about a damsel in dis-
tress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city
glittering with jewels. Archaism is a regular feature of all social
uses of archetypes. Soviet Russia is very proud of its production of
tractors, but it will be some time before the tractor replaces the
sickle on the Soviet flag.
It is at this point that we must notice and avoid the fallacy of a
theory of mythological contract. That is, there may be such a thing
as a social contract in political theory, if we keep the discussion to
observable facts about the present structure of society. But when
these facts are attached to a fable about something that happened
in a past too remote for any evidence to disturb the fabler's as-
sertions, and we are told that once upon a time men surrendered
or delegated or were tricked into surrendering their power, political
theory has merely become one of Plato's indoctrinating lies. And
because the only evidence for this remote event is its analogy to
the present facts, the present facts are being compared with their
own shadows. A precisely similar fabling process has taken place
in the literary criticism concerned with myth, which has hardly
yet emerged from its historical contract stage.
As the archetypal critic is concerned with ritual and dream, it is
likely that he would find much of interest in the work done by
contemporar}^ anthropology in ritual, and by contemporary psy-
chology in dreams. Specifically, the work done on the ritual basis
of naive drama in Frazer's Golden Bough, and the work done on
the dream basis of naive romance by Jung and the Jungians, are
of most direct value to him. But the three subjects of anthropology,
psychology, and literary criticism are not yet clearly separated, and
the danger of determinism has to be carefully watched. To the
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
literary critic, ritual is the content of dramatic action, not the source
or origin of it. The Golden Bough is, from the point of view of
literary criticism, an essay on the ritual content of naive drama:
that is, it reconstructs an archetypal ritual from which the struc-
tural and generic principles of drama may be logically, not chrono-
logically, derived. It does not matter two pins to the literary critic
whether such a ritual had any historical existence or not. It is very
probable that Frazer^s hypothetical ritual would have many and
striking analogies to actual rituals, and collecting such analogies
is part of his argument. But an analogy is not necessarily a source,
an influence, a cause, or an embryonic form, much less an identity.
The literary relation of ritual to drama, like that of any other aspect
of human action to drama, is a relation of content to form only,
not one of source to derivation.
The critic, therefore, is concerned only with the ritual or dream
patterns which are actually in what he is studying, however they
got there. The work of the Classical scholars who have followed
Frazer's lead has produced a general theory of the spectacular or
ritual content of Greek drama. The Golden Bough purports to be
a work of anthropology, but it has had more influence on literary
criticism than in its own alleged field, and it may yet prove to be
really a work of literary criticism. If the ritual pattern is in the
plays— and it is fact, not opinion, that one of the main themes of
Iphigeneia in Tauris, for example, is human sacrifice— the critic
need not take sides in the quite separate historical controversy
over the ritual origin of Greek drama. Hence ritual, as the content
of action, and more particularly of dramatic action, is something
continuously latent in the order of words, and is quite independent
of direct influence. Even in the nineteenth century, we find that
the instant drama becomes primitive and popular, as it does in
The Mikado, to repeat an example given before, back comes all
Frazer's apparatus, the king's son, the mock sacrifice, the analogy
with the festival of the Sacaea, and many other things that Gilbert
knew and cared nothing about. It comes back because it is still
the best way of holding an audience's attention, and the experi-
enced dramatist knows it.
The prestige of documentary criticism, which deals entirely with
sources and historical transmission, has misled some archetypal
critics into feeling that all such ritual elements ought to be traced
directly, like the lineage of royalty, as far back as a willing sus-
SECOND ESSAY; ETHICAL CRITICISM
pension of disbelief will allow. The vast chronological gaps result-
ing are usually bridged by some theory of race memory, or by
some conspiratorial conception of history involving secrets jealously
guarded for centuries by esoteric cults or traditions. It is curious
that when archetypal critics hang on to a historical framework
they almost invariably produce some hypothesis of continuous de-
generation from a golden age lost in antiquity. Thus the prelude
to Thomas Mann's Joseph series traces back several of our central
myths to Atlantis, Atlantis being clearly more useful as an arche-
typal idea than as a historical one. When archetypal criticism re-
vived in the nineteenth century with a vogue for sun myths, an
attempt was made to ridicule it by proving with equal plausibility
that Napoleon was a sun myth. The ridicule is effective only
against the historical distortion of the method. Archetypally, we
turn Napoleon into a sun myth whenever we speak of the rise of
his career, the zenith of his fame, or the eclipse of his fortunes.
Social and cultural history, which is anthropology in an ex-
tended sense, will always be a part of the context of criticism, and
the more clearly the anthropological and the critical treatments of
ritual are distinguished, the more beneficial their influence on
each other will be. The same is true of the relation of psychology
to criticism. The first and most striking unit of poetry larger than
the individual poem is the total work of the man who wrote the
poem. Biography will always be a part of criticism, and the biog-
rapher will naturally be interested in his subject's poetry as a per-
sonal document, recording his private dreams, associations, ambi-
tions, and expressed or repressed desires. Studies of such matters
form an essential part of criticism. I am not of course speaking
of the silly ones, which simply project the author's own erotica,
in a rationalized clinical disguise, on his victim, but only of the
serious studies which are technically competent both in psychology
and in criticism, which are aware how much guesswork is involved
and how tentative all the conclusions must be.
Such an approach is easiest, and most rewarding, with what we
have called thematic writers of the low mimetic— that is, chiefly,
the Romantic poets, where the poet's own psychological processes
are often part of the theme. With other writers, say a dramatist
who is aware from the first word he writes that ''They who live
to please must please to live," there is danger of making an unreal
abstraction of the poet from his literary community. Suppose a
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
critic finds that a certain pattern is repeated time and again in the
plays of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is unique or anomalous, or
even exceptional, in using this pattern, the reason for his use of it
may be at least partly psychological. If there were any evidence
that he had persisted in using it when it failed to please an audi-
ence, the probability of a personal psychological element would be
very high. But if we can find the same pattern in half a dozen of
his contemporaries, we clearly have to allow for convention. And
if we find it in a dozen dramatists of diflferent ages and cultures,
we have to allow for genre, for the structural requirements of
drama itself. Now as a matter of fact we do find in Shakespeare’s
comedies that the same devices are used over and over, and it is
the business of the literary critic to compare these devices with
those of other dramatists, in a morphological study of comic form.
Otherwise we shall deprive ourselves of the perfectly legitimate
appreciation of the scholarly qualities of Shakespeare, of seeing in
the repeated devices of his comedies a kind of Art of Fugue of
comedy.
A psychologist examining a poem will tend to see in it what
he sees in the dream, a mixture of latent and manifest content.
For the literary critic the manifest content of the poem is its form,
hence its latent content becomes simply its actual content, its
dianoia or theme. And this dianoia on the archetypal level is a
dream, a presentation of the conflict of desire and actuality. We
seem to be going around in a circle, but not quite. For the critic,
a problem appears which does not exist for a purely psychological
analysis, the problem of communicable latent content, of intel-
ligible dream, Plato’s conception of art as a dream for awakened
minds. For the psychologist all dream symbols are private ones,
interpreted by the personal life of the dreamer. For the critic there
is no such thing as private symbolism, or, if there is, it is his job
to make sure that it does not remain so.
This problem is already present in Freud’s treatment of Oedipus
Tyrannus as a play which owes much of its power to the fact that
it dramatizes the Oedipus complex. The dramatic and psychological
elements can be linked without any reference to the personal life
of Sophocl^, of which we know nothing whatever. This emphasis
on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school,
where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for a
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
theory of a collective unconscious— an unnecessary hypothesis in
literary criticism, so far as I can judge.
What we have found to be true of the writer's intention is also
true of the audience's attention. Both are centripetally directed,
and implications exist in the response to art as they do in the
creation of it, implications of which the audience is not explicitly
aware. Discrete conscious awareness can take in only a very few
details of the complex of response. This state of things enabled
Tennyson, for instance, to be praised for the chastity of his lan-
guage and read for his powerful erotic sensuousness. It also makes
it possible for a contemporary critic to draw on the fullest resources
of modern knowledge in explicating a work of art without any real
fear of anachronism.
For instance, Le Mdade Imaginaire is a play about a man who,
in seventeenth-century terms, including no doubt Moli^re's own
terms, was not really sick but just thought he was. A modem critic
might object that life is not so simple: that it is perfectly possible
for a malade imaginaire to be a malade yeritable, and that what is
wrong with Argan is clearly an unwillingness to see his children
grow up, an infantile regression which his wife— his second wife,
incidentally— shows that she understands completely by coddling
him and murmuring such phrases as “pauvre petit fils." Such a
critic would find the clue to Argan's whole behavior in his unguarded
remark after the scene with the little girl Louison (the erotic nature
of which the critic would also notice): *‘I1 n'y a plus d'enfants."
Now whether this reading is right or wrong, it does not swerve
from Moli^re's text, yet it tells us nothing about Moli^re himself.
The play is generically a comedy; it must therefore end happily;
Argan must therefore be brought to see some reason; his wife,
whose dramatic function it is to keep him within his obsession,
must therefore be “exposed" as inimical to him. The plot is a ritual
moving toward a scapegoat rejection followed by a marriage, and
the theme is a dream-pattern of irrational desire in conflict with
reality.
Another essay in this book will be concerned with the details
and practice of archetypal criticism: here we are concerned only
with its place in the context of criticism as a whole. In its arche-
typal aspect, art is a part of civilization, and civilization we defined
as the process of making a human form out of nature. The shape
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
of this human form is revealed by civilization itself as it develops:
its major components are the city, the garden, the farm, the sheep-
fold, and the like, as well as human society itself. An archetypal
symbol is usually a natural object with a human meaning, and it
forms part of the critical view of art as a civilized product, a vision
of the goals of human work.
Such a vision is bound to idealize some aspects of civilization
and ridicule or ignore others; in other words the social context of
art is also the moral context. All artists have to come to terms with
their communities: many artists, and many great ones, are content
to be the spokesmen of them. But in terms of his moral significance,
the poet reflects, and follows at a distance, what his community
really achieves through its work. Hence the moral view of the
artist is invariably that he ought to assist the work of his society by
framing workable hypotheses, imitating human action and thought
in such a way as to suggest realizable modes of both. If he does
not do this, his hypotheses should at least be clearly labelled as
playful or fantastic. Marxism takes more or less this view of art,
and thereby repeats the argument reached at the end of the Re-
public, We are told there, if we follow the argument simply as it
stands, that according to justice, or social work properly done, the
painter's bed is an external imitation of the craftsman's bed. The
artist, therefore, is confined either to reflecting or to escaping from
the world that the true worker is realizing.
We have adopted the principle in this essay that the events and
ideas of poetry are hypothetical imitations of history and discursive
writing respectively, which in their turn are verbal imitations of
action and thought. This principle brings us close to the view of
poetry as a secondary imitation of reality. We are interpreting
mimesis, however, not as a Platonic “recollection" but as an
emancipation of externality into image, nature into art. From
this point of view the work of art must be its own object: it cannot
be ultimately descriptive of something, and can never be ultimately
related to any other system of phenomena, standards, values, or
final causes. All such external relations form part of the “inten-
tional fallacy." Poetry is a vehicle for morality, truth, and beauty,
but the poet does not aim at these things, but only at inner verM
strength. The poet qua poet intends only to write a poem, and
as a rule it is not the artist, but the ego in the artist, who turns
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
away from his proper work to go and chase these other seductive
marshlights.
It is an elementary axiom in criticism that morally the lion lies
down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen,
The Miller's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale, are all equally
elements of a liberal education, and the only moral criterion to be
applied to them is that of decorum. Similarly, the moral attitude
taken by the poet in his work derives largely from the structure
of that work. Thus the fact that Le Malade Imaginaire is a comedy
is the only reason for making Argan's wife a hypocrite~she must
be got rid of to make the play end happily.
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than
the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temp-
tation to the ego. Beauty, like truth and goodness, is a quality that
may in one sense be predicated of all great art, but the deliberate
attempt to beautify can, in itself, only weaken the creative energy.
Beauty in art is like happiness in morals: it may accompany the
act, but it cannot be the goal of the act, just as one cannot “pursue
happiness,'" but only something else that may give happiness. Aim-
ing at beauty produces, at best, the attractive: the quality of beauty
represented by the word loveliness, a quality which depends on a
carefully restricted choice of both subject and technique. A re-
ligious painter, for instance, can produce this quality only as long
as churches keep commissioning Madonnas: if a church asks for a
Crucifixion he must paint cruelty and horror instead.
When we speak of the human body as “beautiful,"" we usually
mean the body of someone in good physical condition between
eighteen and about thirty, and if Degas, for example, shows us
pictures of thick-bottomed matrons squatting in hip baths, we
interpret the shock to our propriety as an aesthetic judgement.
Whenever the word beauty means loveliness or attractiveness, as
it is bound to do whenever it is made the intention of art, it be-
comes reactionary: it tries to restrict either what the artist may
choose for a subject or the method in which he may choose to treat
it, and it marshals all the forces of prudery to keep him from ex-
panding his vision beyond an arid and insipid pseudo-classicism.
Ruskin spoiled many of his finest critical insights with this fallacy;
Tennyson often hampered the vigor of his poetry by it, and in some
of the lesser beauticians of the same period we can see clearly
what the neurotic compulsion to beautify everything leads to. It
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
leads to an exaggerated cult of style, a technique of making every-
thing in a work of art, even a drama, sound all alike, and like the
author, and like the author at his most impressive. Here again the
vanity of the ego has replaced the honest pride of the craftsman.
The formal or third phase of narrative and meaning, although
it includes the external relations of literature to events and ideas,
nevertheless brings us back ultimately to the aesthetic view of the
work of art as an object of contemplation, a techne designed for
ornament and pleasure rather than use. This view encourages us
to separate aesthetic objects from other kinds of artifacts and to
postulate an aesthetic experience different in kind from other
experiences. Corresponding to the bibliographical view of litera-
ture as the aggregate or pile of all the books and plays and poems
that have been written, we find the aesthetic view of criticism as a
discrete series of special (sometimes vaguely sacramental) appre-
hensions. There is no reason for not granting this view of literary
experience its own validity; one objects to it only when it excludes
other approaches.
The archetypal view of literature shows us literature as a total
form and literary experience as a part of the continuum of life,
in which one of the poet's functions is to visualize the goals of
human work. As soon as we add this approach to the other three,
literature becomes an ethical instrument, and we pass beyond
Kierkegaard's ^'Either/Ori' dilemma between aesthetic idolatry
and ethical freedom, without any temptation to dispose of the
arts in the process. Hence the importance, after accepting the
validity of this view of literature, of rejecting the external goals of
morality, beauty, and truth. The fact that they are external makes
them ultimately idolatrous, and so demonic. But if no social, moral,
or aesthetic standard is in the long run externally determinative of
the value of art, it follows that the archetypal phase, in which art
is part of civilization, cannot be the ultimate one. We need still
another phase where we can pass from civilization, where poetry
is still useful and functional, to culture, where it is disinterested
and liberal, and stands on its own feet.
ANAGOGIC PHASE: SYMBOI, AS MONAD
In tracing the diflferent phases of literary symbolism, we have
been going up a sequence parallel to that of medieval criticism.
We have, it is true, established a different meaning for the word
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
‘"literal.” It is our second or descriptive level that corresponds to
the historical or literal one of the medieval scheme, or at any rate
of Dante's version of it Our third level, the level of commentary
and interpretation, is the second or allegorical level of the Middle
Ages. Our fourth level, the study of myths, and of poetry as a
technique of social communication, is the third medieval level
of moral and tropological meaning, concerned at once with the
social and the figurative aspect of meaning. The medieval dis-
tinction between the allegorical as what one believes {quid credas)
and the moral as what one does {quid agas) is also reflected in our
conception of the formal phase as aesthetic or speculative and the
archetypal phase as social and part of the continuum of work. We
have now to see if we can establish a modern parallel to the medieval
conception of anagogy or universal meaning.
Again, the reader may have noticed a parallelism gradually
shaping up between the five modes of our first essay and the phases
of symbolism in this one. Literal meaning, as we expounded it, has
much to do with the techniques of thematic irony introduced by
symbolisme, and with the view of many of the “new” critics that
poetry is primarily (i.e., literally) an ironic structure. Descriptive
symbolism, shown at its most uncompromising in the documentary
naturalism of the nineteenth century, seems to bear a close con-
nection with the low mimetic, and formal symbolism, most easily
studied in Renaissance and neo-Classical writers, with the high
mimetic. Archetypal criticism seems to find its center of gravity
in the mode of romance, when the interchange of ballads, folk
tales, and popular stories was at its easiest. If the parallel holds,
then, the last phase of symbolism will still be concerned, as the
previous one was, with the mythopoeic aspect of literature, but
with myth in its narrower and more technical sense of fictions and
themes relating to divine or quasi-divine beings and powers.
We have associated archetypes and myths particularly with
primitive and popular literature. In fact we could almost define
popular literature, admittedly in a rather circular way, as literature
which affords an unobstructed view of archetypes. We can find this
quality on every level of literature: in fairy tales and folk tales, in
Shakespeare (in most of the comedies), in the Bible (which would
still be a popular book if it were not a sacred one), in Bunyan, in
Richardson, in Dickens, in Poe, and of course in a vast amount
of ephemeral rubbish as well. We began this book by remarking
ii6
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
that we cannot correlate popularity and value. But there is still
the danger of reduction, or assuming that literature is essentially
primitive and popular. This view had a great vogue in the nine-
teenth century, and is by no means dead yet, but if we were to
adopt it we should cut off a third and most important source of
supply for archetypal criticism.
We notice that many learned and recondite writers whose work
requires patient study are explicitly mythopoeic writers. Instances
include Dante and Spenser, and in the twentieth century embrace
nearly all the “difficult'' writers in both poetry and prose. Such
work, when fictional, is often founded on a basis of naive drama
[Faust, Peer Gynt) or naive romance (Hawthorne, Melville: one
may compare the sophisticated allegories of Charles Williams and
C. S. Lewis in our day, which are largely based on the formulas
of the Boy's Own Paper). Learned mythopoeia, as we have it in
the last period of Henry James and in James Joyce, for example,
may become bewilderingly complex; but the complexities are de-
signed to reveal and not to disguise the myth. We cannot assume
that a primitive and popular myth has been swathed like a mummy
in elaborate verbiage, which is the assumption that the fallacy of
reduction would lead to. The inference seems to be that the learned
and the subtle, like the primitive and the popular, tend toward a
center of imaginative experience.
Knowing that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early Shake-
speare comedy and The Winter's Tale a late one, the student would
expect the later play to be more subtle and complex; he might not
expect it to be more archaic and primitive, more suggestive of
ancient myths and rituals. The later play is also more popular,
though not popular of course in the sense of giving a lower-middle
class audience what it thinks it wants. As a result of expressing the
inner forms of drama with increasing force and intensity, Shake-
speare arrived in his last period at the bedrock of drama, the ro-
mantic spectacle out of which all the more specialized forms of
drama, such as tragedy and social comedy, have come, and to which
they recurrently return. In the greatest moments of Dante and
Shakespeare, in, say The Tempest or the climax of the Pmgatorio,
we have a feeling of converging significance, the feeling that here
we are close to seeing what our whole literary experience has been
about, the feeling that we have moved into the stiH c^ter of the
order of words. Criticism as knowledge, the criticism whidi is
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
compelled to keep on talking about the subject, recognizes the
fact that there is a center of the order of words.
Unless there is such a center, there is nothing to prevent the
analogies supplied by convention and genre from being an endless
series of free associations, perhaps suggestive, perhaps even tantaliz-
ing, but never creating a real structure. The study of archetypes
is the study of literary symbols as parts of a whole. If there are such
things as archetypes at all, then, we have to take yet another step,
and conceive the possibility of a self-contained literary universe.
Either archetypal criticism is a will-o’-the-wisp, an endless laby-
rinth without an outlet, or we have to assume that literature is a
total form, and not simply the name given to the aggregate of
existing literary works. We spoke before of the mythical view
of literature as leading to the conception of an order of nature as
a whole being imitated by a conesponding order of words.
if archetypes are communicable symbols, and there is a center
of archetypes, we should expect to find, at that center, a group of
universal symbols. I do not mean by this phrase that there is any
archetypal code book which has been memorized by all human
societies without exception. I mean that some symbols are images
of things common to all men, and therefore have a communicable
power which is potentially unlimited. Such symbols include those
of food and drink, of the quest or journey, of light and darkness,
and of sexual fulfilment, which would usually take the form of
maniage. It is inadvisable to assume that an Adonis or Oedipus
myth is universal, or that certain associations, such as the serpent
with the phallus, are universal, because when we discover a group
of people who know nothing of such matters we must assume that
they did know and have forgotten, or do know and won’t tell, or
are not members of the human race. On the other hand, they may
be confidently excluded from the human race if they cannot un-
derstand the conception of food, and so any symbolism founded on
food is universal in the sense of having an indefinitely extensive
scope. That is, there are no limits to its intelligibility.
In the archetypal phase the work of literary art is a myth, and
unites the ritual and the dream. By doing so it limits the dream: it
makes it plausible and acceptable to a social waking consciousness.
Thus as a moral fact in civilization, literature embodies a good
deal of the spirit which in the dream itself is called the censor.
But the censor stands in the way of the impetus of the dream.
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
When we look at the dream as a whole, we notice three things
about it. First, its limits are not the real, but the conceivable. Sec-
ond, the limit of the conceivable is the world of fulfilled desire
emancipated from all anxieties and frustrations. Third, the uni-
verse of the dream is entirely within the mind of the dreamer.
In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of
man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the
circumference and not at the center of its reality. We see here the
completion of the imaginative revolution begun when we passed
from the descriptive to the formal phase of symbolism. There, the
imitation of nature shifted from a reflection of external nature to
a formal organization of which nature was the content. But in the
formal phase the poem is still contained by nature, and in the
archetypal phase the whole of poetry is still contained within the
limits of the natural, or plausible. When we pass into anagogy,
nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and
the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest,
the maniage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs
inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is
now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out
of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or
imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence
apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative
conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and
eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human
than to being inanimate. ''The desire of man being infinite,” said
Blake, "the possession is infinite and himself infinite.” If Blake is
thought a prejudiced witness on this point, we may cite Hooker:
"Tliat there is somewhat higher than either of these two (sensual
and intellectual perfection), no other proof doth need than the
very process of man's desire, which being natural should be frus-
trate, if there were not some farther thing wherein it might rest at
the length contented, which in the former it cannot do.”
If we turn to ritual, we see there an imitation of nature which
has a strong element of what we call magic in it. Magic seems to
begin as something of a voluntary effort to recapture a lost rapport
with the natural cycle. This sense of a deliberate recapturing of
something no longer possessed is a distinctive mark of human
ritual. Ritual constructs a calendar and endeavors to imitate the
precise and sensitive accuracy of the movements of the heavenly
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
bodies and the response of vegetation to them. A farmer must
harvest his crop at a certain time of the year, but because he must
do this anyway, harvesting itself is not precisely a ritual. It is the
expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies at
that time which produces the harvest songs, harv^est sacrifices, and
harvest folk customs that we associate with ritual. But the impetus
of the magical element in ritual is clearly toward a universe in
which a stupid and indifferent nature is no longer the container
of human society, but is contained by that society, and must rain
or shine at the pleasure of man. We notice too the tendency of
ritual to become not only cyclical but encyclopaedic, as already
noted. In its anagogic phase, then, poetry imitates human action
as total ritual, and so imitates the action of an omnipotent human
society that contains all the powers of nature within itself.
Anagogically, then, poetry unites total ritual, or unlimited social
action, with total dream, or unlimited individual thought. Its uni-
verse is infinite and boundless hypothesis: it cannot be contained
within any actual civilization or set of moral values, for the same
reason that no structure of imagery can be restricted to one al-
legorical interpretation. Here the dianoia of art is no longer a mi-
mesis logon, but the Logos, the shaping word which is both
reason and, as Goethe's Faust speculated, praxis or creative act.
The ethos of art is no longer a group of characters within a natural
setting, but a universal man who is also a divine being, or a divine
being conceived in anthropomorphic terms.
The form of literature most deeply influenced by the anagogic
phase is the scripture or apocalyptic revelation. The god, whether
traditional deity, glorified hero, or apotheosized poet, is the central
image that poetry uses in trying to convey the sense of unlimited
power in a humanized form. Many of these scriptures are docu-
ments of religion as well, and hence are a mixture of the imaginative
and the existential. When they lose their existential content they
become purely imaginative, as Classical mythology did after the
rise of Christianity. They belong in general, of course, to the
mythical or theogonic mode. We see the relation to anagogy also
in the vast encyclopaedic structure of poetry that seems to be a
whole world in itself, that stands in its culture as an inexhaustible
storehouse of imaginative suggestion, and seems, like theories of
gravitation or relativity in the physical universe, to be applicable
to, or have analogous connections with, every part of the literary
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
universe. Such works are definitive myths, or complete organiza-
tions of archetypes. They include what in the previous essay we
called analogies of revelation: the epics of Dante and Milton and
their counterparts in the other modes.
But the anagogic perspective is not to be confined only to works
that seem to take in everything, for the principle of anagogy is not
simply that everything is the subject of poetry, but that anything
may be the subject of a poem. The sense of the infinitely varied
unity of poetry may come, not only explicitly from an apocalyptic
epic, but implicitly from any poem. We said that we could get a
whole liberal education by picking up one conventional poem,
Lycidas for example, and following its archetypes through litera-
ture. Thus the center of the literary universe is whatever poem we
happen to be reading. One step further, and the poem appears
as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the
total order of words. Anagogically, then, the symbol is a monad,
all symbols being united in a single infinite and eternal verbal
symbol which is, as dianoia, the Logos, and, as mythos, total creative
act. It is this conception which Joyce expresses, in terms of subject-
matter, as ''epiphany,” and Hopkins, in terms of form, as "inscape.”
If we look at Lycidas anagogically, for example, we see that the
subject of the elegy has been identified with a god who personifies
both the sun that falls into the western ocean at night and the
vegetable life that dies in the autumn. In the latter aspect Lycidas
is the Adonis or Tammuz whose "annual wound,” as Milton calls it
elsewhere, was the subject of a ritual lament in Mediterranean
religion, and has been incorporated in the pastoral elegy since
Theocritus, as the title of Shelley's Adonais shows more clearly. As
a poet, Lycidas's archetype is Orpheus, who also died young, in
much the same role as Adonis, and was flung into the water. As
priest, his archetype is Peter, who would have drowned on the
"Galilean lake” without the help of Christ. Each aspect of Lycidas
poses the question of premature death as it relates to the life of
man, of poetry, and of the Church. But all of these aspects are
contained within the figure of Christ, the young dying god who
is eternally alive, the Word that contains all poetry, the h^d and
body of the Church, the good Shepherd whose pastoral world sees
no winter, the Sun of righteousness that never sets, whose power
can raise Lycidas, like Peter, out of the waves, as it redeems souls
from the lower world, which Orpheus failed to do. CSirist does not
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
enter the poem as a character, but he pervades every line of it so
completely that the poem, so to speak, enters him.
Anagogic criticism is usually found in direct connection with
religion, and is to be discovered chiefly in the more uninhibited
utterances of poets themselves. It comes out in those passages of
Eliot's quartets where the words of the poet are placed within
the context of the incarnate Word. An even clearer statement is
in a letter of Rilke, where he speaks of the function of the poet as
revealing a perspective of reality like that of an angel, containing
all time and space, who is blind and looking into himself. Rilke's
angel is a modification of the more usual god or Christ, and his
statement is all the more valuable because it is explicitly not Chris-
tian, and illustrates the independence of the anagogic perspective,
of the poet's attempt to speak from the circumference instead of
from the center of reality, from the acceptance of any specific re-
ligion. Similar views are expressed or implied in Valery's conception
of a total intelligence which appears more fancifully in his figure
of M. Teste; in Yeats's cryptic utterances about the artifice of eter-
nity, and, in The Tower and elsewhere, about man as the creator
of all creation as well as of both life and death; in Joyce's non-
theological use of the theological term epiphany; in Dylan Thomas's
exultant hymns to a universal human body. We may note in passing
that the more sharply we distinguish the poetic and the critical
functions, the easier it is for us to take seriously what great writers
have said about their work.
The anagogic view of criticism thus leads to the conception of
literature as existing in its own universe, no longer a commentary
on life or reality, but containing life and reality in a system of
verbal relationships. From this point of view the critic can no longer
think of literature as a tiny palace of art looking out upon an in-
conceivably gigantic ''life." "Life" for him has become the seed-plot
of literature, a vast mass of potential literary forms, only a few
of which will grow up into the greater world of the literary universe.
Similar universes exist for all the arts. "We make to ourselves
pictures of facts," says Wittgenstein, but by pictures he means
representative illustrations, which are not pictures. Pictures as pic-
tures are themselves facts, and exist only in a pictorial universe.
"Tout, au monde," says Mallarm6, "existe pour aboutir ^ un livre."
So far we have been dealing with symbols as isolated units, but
122
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
clearly the unit of relationship between two symbols, corresponding
to the phrase in music, is of equal importance. The testimony of
critics from Aristotle on seems fairly unanimous that this unit of
relationship is the metaphor. And the metaphor, in its radical form,
is a statement of identity of the “A is B"' type, or rather, putting it
into its proper hypothetical form, of the ‘let X be Y” type (letters
altered for euphony). Thus the metaphor turns its back on ordinary
descriptive meaning, and presents a structure which literally is
ironic and paradoxical. In ordinary descriptive meaning, if A is B
then B is A, and all we have really said is that A is itself. In the
metaphor two things are identified while each retains its own
form. Thus if we say “the hero was a lion'’ we identify the hero
with the lion, while at the same time both the hero and the lion
are identified as themselves. A work of literary art owes its unity to
this process of identification with, and its variety, clarity, and in-
tensity to identification as.
On the literal level of meaning, metaphor appears in its literal
shape, which is simple juxtaposition. Ezra Pound, in explaining
this aspect of metaphor, uses the illustrative figure of the Chinese
ideogram, which expresses a complex image by throwing a group
of elements together without predication. In Pound's famous black-
board example of such a metaphor, the two-line poem “In a Sta-
tion of the Metro," the images of the faces in the crowd and the
petals on the black bough are juxtaposed with no predicate of any
kind connecting them. Predication belongs to assertion and descrip-
tive meaning, not to the literal structure of poetry.
On the descriptive level we have the double perspective of the
verbal structure and the phenomena to which it is related. Here
meaning is “literal” in the common sense which we explained
would not do for criticism, an unambiguous alignment of words
and facts. Descriptively, then, all metaphors are similes. When we
are writing ordinary discursive prose and use a metaphor, we are
not asserting that A is B; we are “really” saying that A is in some
respects comparable with B; and similarly when we are extracting
the descriptive or paraphrasable meaning of a poem. “The hero
was a lion,” then, on the descriptive level, is a simile with the word
“like” omitted for greater vividness, and to show more clearly that
the analogy is only a hypothetical one. In Whitman’s poem Out of
the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, we find shadows “twining and twist-
ing as if they were alive,” and the moon swollen “as if with tean.”
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
As there is no poetic reason why shadows should not be alive or the
moon tearful, we may perhaps see in the cautious “as if' the work-
ing of a low mimetic discursive prose conscience.
On the formal level, where symbols are images or natural phe-
nomena conceived as matter or content, the metaphor is an analogy
of natural proportion. Literally, metaphor is juxtaposition; we say
simply “A; B." Descriptively, we say “A is (like) B/' But formally
we say “A is as B." An analogy of proportion thus requires four
terms, of which two have a common factor. Thus “the hero was a
lion” means, as a form of expression which has nature for its in-
ternal content, that the hero is to human courage as the lion is to
animal courage, courage being the factor common to the third and
fourth terms.
Archetypally, where the symbol is an associative cluster, the
metaphor unites two individual images, each of which is a specific
representative of a class or genus. The rose in Dante's Paradiso and
the rose in Yeats's early lyrics are identified with different things,
but both stand for all roses— all poetic roses, of course, not all
botanical ones. Archetypal metaphor thus involves the use of what
has been called the concrete universal, the individual identified
with its class, Wordsworth's “tree of many one.” Of course there
are no real universal in poetry, only poetic ones. All four of these
aspects of metaphor are recognized in Aristotle's discussion of met-
aphor in the Poetics, though sometimes very briefly and elliptically.
In the anagogic aspect of meaning, the radical form of metaphor,
“A is B,” comes into its own. Here we are dealing with poetry in
its totality, in which the formula “A is B” may be hypothetically
applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even “black is
white,” which a reader has any right to quarrel with in advance.
The literary universe, therefore, is a universe in which everything
is potentially identical with everything else. This does not mean
that any two things in it are separate and very similar, like peas in
a pod, or in the slangy and erroneous sense of the word in which
we speak of identical twins. If twins were really identical they would
be the same person. On the other hand, a grown man feels identical
with himself at the age of seven, although the two manifestations
of this identity, the man and the boy, have very little in common
as regards similarity or likeness. In form, matter, personality, time,
and space, man and boy are quite unlike. This is the only type of
image I can think of that illustrates the process of identifying two
124
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
independent forms. All poetry, then, proceeds as though all poetic
images were contained within a single universal body. Identity is
the opposite of similarity or likeness, and total identity is not uni-
formity, still less monotony, but a unity of various things.
Finally, identification belongs not only to the structure of poetry,
but to the structure of criticism as well, at least of commentary.
Interpretation proceeds by metaphor as well as creation, and even
more explicitly. When St. Paul interprets the story of Abraham’s
wives in Genesis, for instance, he says that Hagar ''is” Mount Sinai
in Arabia. Poetry, said Coleridge, is the identity of knowledge.
The universe of poetry, however, is a literary universe, and not
a separate existential universe. Apocalypse means revelation, and
when art becomes apocalyptic, it reveals. But it reveals only on its
own terms, and in its own forms: it does not describe or represent
a separate content of revelation. When poet and critic pass from
the archetypal to the anagogic phase, they enter a phase of which
only religion, or something as infinite in its range as religion, can
possibly form an external goal. The poetic imagination, unless it
disciplines itself in the particular way in which the imaginations
of Hardy and Housman were disciplined, is apt to get claustro-
phobia when it is allowed to talk only about human nature and
subhuman nature; and poets are happier as servants of religion than
of politics, because the transcendental and apocalyptic perspec-
tive of religion comes as a tremendous emancipation of the im-
aginative mind. If men were compelled to make the melancholy
choice between atheism and superstition, the scientist, as Bacon
pointed out long ago, would be compelled to choose atheism, but
the poet would be compelled to choose superstition, for even super-
stition, by its very confusion of values, gives his imagination more
scope than a dogmatic denial of imaginative infinity does. But the
loftiest religion, no less than the grossest superstition, comes to the
poet, qua poet, only as the spirits came to Yeats, to give him meta-
phors for poetry.
The study of literature takes us toward seeing poetry as the imi-
tation of infinite social action and infinite human thought, the
mind of a man who is all men, the universal creative word which is
all words. About this man and word we can, speaking as critics,
say only one thing ontologically: we have no reason to suppose
either that they exist or that they do not exist. We c^n call them
divine if by divine we mean the unlimited or projected human.
125
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
But the critic, qua critic, has nothing to say for or against the
affirmations that a religion makes out of these conceptions. If
Christianity wishes to identify the infinite Word and Man of the
literary universe with the Word of God, the person of Christ, the
historical Jesus, the Bible or church dogma, these identifications
may be accepted by any poet or critic without injury to his work—
the acceptance may even clarify and intensify his work, depending
on his temperament and situation. But they can never be accepted
by poetry as a whole, or by criticism as such. The literary critic,
like the historian, is compelled to treat every religion in the same
way that religions treat each other, as though it were a human
hypothesis, whatever else he may in other contexts believe it to be.
The discussion of the universal Word at the opening of the
Chhandogya Upanishad (where it is symbolized by the sacred
word ''Aum’') is exactly as relevant and as irrelevant to literary
criticism as the discussion at the opening of the Fourth Gospel.
Coleridge was right in thinking that the '‘Logos'' was the goal of
his work as a critic, but not right in thinking that his poetic Logos
would so inevitably be absorbed into Christ as to make literary
criticism a kind of natural theology.
The total Logos of criticism by itself can never become an
object of faith or an ontological personality. The conception of a
total Word is the postulate that there is such a thing as an order
of words, and that the criticism which studies it makes, or could
make, complete sense. Aristotle's Physics leads to the conception
of an unmoved first mover at the circumference of the physical
universe. This, in itself, means essentially that physics has a uni-
verse. The systematic study of motion would be impossible unless
all phenomena of motion could be related to unifying principles,
and those in their turn to a total unifying principle of movement
which is not itself merely another phenomenon of motion. If
theology identifies Aristotle's urimoved mover with a creating God,
that is the business of theology; physics as physics will be unaffected
by it. Christian critics may see their total Word as an analogy of
Christ, as medieval critics did, but as literature itself may be ac-
companied in culture by any religion, criticism must detach itself
accordingly. In short, the study of literature belongs to the “hu-
manities," and the humanities, as their name indicates, can take
only the human view of the superhuman.
The close resemblance between the conceptions of anagogic
126
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
criticism and those of religion has led many to assume that they
can only be related by making one supreme and the other sub-
ordinate. Those who choose religion, like Coleridge, will, like
him, try to make criticism a natural theology; those who choose
culture, like Arnold, will try to reduce religion to objectified cul-
tural myth. But for the purity of each the autonomy of each must
be guaranteed. Culture interposes, between the ordinary and the
religious life, a total vision of possibilities, and insists on its totality
—for whatever is excluded from culture by religion or state will
get its revenge somehow. Thus culture's essential service to a re-
ligion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in
religion to replace the object of its worship with its present under-
standing and forms of approach to that object. Just as no argument
in favor of a religious or political doctrine is of any value unless it
is an intellectually honest argument, and so guarantees the au-
tonomy of logic, so no religious or political myth is either valuable
or valid unless it assumes the autonomy of culture, which may be
provisionally defined as the total body of imaginative hypothesis in
a society and its tradition. To defend the autonomy of culture in
this sense seems to me the social task of the ^'intellectual" in the
modern world: if so, to defend its subordination to a total syn-
thesis of any kind, religious or political, would be the authentic
form of the trahison des clercs.
Besides, it is of the essence of imaginative culture that it tran-
scends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally
acceptable. The argument that there is no room for poets in any
human society which is an end in itself remains unanswerable
even when the society is the people of God. For religion is also a
social institution, and so far as it is one, it imposes limitations on
the arts just as a Marxist or Platonic state would do. Christian
theology is no less of a revolutionary dialectic, or indissoluble union
of theory and social practice. Religions, in spite of their enlarged
perspective, cannot as social institutions contain an art of un-
limited hypothesis. The arts in their turn cannot help releasing
the powerful acids of satire, realism, ribaldry, and fantasy in their
attempt to dissolve all the existential concretions that get in their
way. The artist often enough has to find that, as God says in
Faust, he "'muss als Teufel schaffen,” which I suppose means
rather more than that he has to work like the devil. Between re-
127
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ligion's "'this is” and poetry's *'but suppose this is,” there must
always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual
meet at infinity. Nobody wants a poet in the perfect human state,
and, as even the poets tell us, nobody but God himself can tolerate
a poltergeist in the City of God.
128
THIRD ESSAY
Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths
Tkird Essay
ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM: THEORY OF MYTHS
INTRODUCTION
In the art of painting it is easy to see both structural and repre-
sentational elements. A picture is normally a picture “of’' some-
thing: it depicts or illustrates a “subject" made up of things analo-
gous to “objects" in sense experience. At the same time there are
present certain elements of pictorial design: what a picture repre-
sents is organized into structural patterns and conventions which
are found only in pictures. The words “content” and “form" are
often employed to describe these complementary aspects of paint-
ing. “Realism" connotes an emphasis on what the picture repre-
sents; stylization, whether primitive or sophisticated, connotes an
emphasis on pictorial structure. Extreme realism of the illusive
or trompe Vceil type is about as far as the painter can go in one
kind of emphasis; abstract, or, more strictly, non-objective painting
is about as far as he can go in the other direction. (The phrase
“non-representational painting" seems to me illogical, a painting
being itself a representation.) The illusive painter however cannot
escape from pictorial conventions, and non-objective painting is
still an imitative art in Aristotle's sense, and so we may say without
much fear of effective contradiction that the whole art of painting
lies within a combination of pictorial “form" or structure and pic-
torial “content" or subject.
For some reason the traditions of both practice and theory in
Western painting have weighed dovm heavily on the imitative
or representational end. Even from Classical painting we have in-
herited a numl^r of depressing stories, of birds pecking painted
grapes and the like, suggesting that Greek painters took their
greatest pride in concocting trompe VceU puzzles. The develop
ment of perspective painting in the Renaissance gave a great
prestige to such skills, the suggesting of three dimensions in a two-
dimensional medium being essentially a trompe Vceil device. An
eavesdropper in a modem art gallery may easily discover the strength
and persistence of the feeling that to achieve recognizable likeness
in a subject, and to make this likeness the primary thing in his
picture, is a moral obli^tion on the painter. A good deal of the
131
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
freakishness of experimental movements in painting during the
last half-century or so has been due to the energy of its revolt
against the tyranny of the representational fallacy.
An original painter knows, of course, that when the public de-
mands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite,
likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with. Hence
when he breaks with these conventions, he is often apt to assert
that he is nothing but an eye, that he merely paints what he sees
as he sees it, and the like. His motive in talking such nonsense is
clear enough: he wishes to say that painting is not merely facile
decoration, and involves a difficult conquest of some very real
spatial problems. But this may be freely admitted without agreeing
that the formal cause of a picture is outside the picture, an as-
sertion which would destroy the whole art if it were taken seriously.
What he has actually done is to obey an obscure but profound
impulse to revolt against the conventions established in his own
day, in order to rediscover convention on a deeper level. By break-
ing with the Barbizon school, Manet discovered a deeper affinity
with Goya and Velasquez; by breaking with the impressionists,
Cezanne discovered a deeper affinity with Chardin and Masaccio.
The possession of originality cannot make an artist unconventional;
it drives him further into convention, obeying the law of the art
itself, which seeks constantly to reshape itself from its own depths,
and which works through its geniuses for metamorphosis, as it
works through minor talents for mutation.
Music affords a refreshing contrast to painting in its critical
theory. When perspective was discovered in painting, music might
well have gone in a similar direction, but in fact the development
of representational or ''program” music has been severely restricted.
Listeners may still derive pleasure from hearing external sounds
cleverly imitated in music, but no one asserts that a composer is
being a decadent or a charlatan if he fails to produce such imita-
tions. Nor is it believed that these imitations are prior in im-
portance to the forms of music itself, still less that they constitute
those forms. The result is that the structural principles of music
are clearly understood, and can be taught even to children.
Suppose, for example, that the present book were an introduction
to musical theory instead of poetics. Then we could begin by
isolating, from the range of audible sounds, the interval of the
octave, and explain that the octave is divided into twelve theoreti-
132
THEORY OF MYTHS
cally equal semitones, forming a scale of twelve notes which contains
potentially all the melodies and harmonies that the reader of the
book will ordinarily hear. Tlien we could abstract the two points
of repose in this scale, the major and minor common chords, and
explain the system of twenty-four interlocking keys and the con-
ventions of tonality which require that a piece should normally
open and close in the same key. We could describe the basis of
rhythm as an accentuation of every second or every third beat,
and so on through the whole list of rudiments.
Such an outline would give a rational account of the structure
of Western music from 1600 to 1900, and, in a qualified and more
flexible but not essentially different form, of everything that the
user of the book would be accustomed to call music. If we chose,
we could lock up all the music outside the Western tradition in
the solitary confinement of a prefatory chapter, before we got
down to serious business. Someone might object that the system
of equal temperament, in which CJ and Db are the same note, is
an arbitrary fiction. Another might object that a composer ought
not to be tied down to so rigidly conventionalized a set of musical
elements, and that the resources of expression in music ought to
be as free as the air. A third might object that we are not talking
about music at all: that while the Jupiter Symphony is in C major
and Beethoven's Fifth is in C minor, explaining the difference
between the two keys will give nobody any real notion of the dif-
ference between the two symphonies. All these objectors could be
quite safely ignored. Our handbook would not give the reader a
complete musical education, nor would it give an account of music
as it exists in the mind of God or the practice of angels— but it
would do for its purposes.
In this book we are attempting to outline a few of the gram-
matical rudiments of literary expression, and the elements of it
that conespond to such musical elements as tonality, simple and
compound rhythm, canonical imitation, and the like. The aim is
to give a rational account of some of the structural principles of
Western literature in the context of its Classical and Christian
heritage. We are suggesting that the resources of verbal expression
are limited, if that is the word, by the literary equivalents of rhythm
and key, though that does not mean, any more than it means in
music, that its resources are artistically exhaustible. We doubtl^
have objectors similar to those just imagined for music, saying
^33
THIRD essay: archetypal criticism
that our categories are artificial, that they do not do justice to the
variety of literature, or that they are not relevant to their own
experiences in reading. However, the question of what the struc-
tural principles of literature actually are seems important enough
to discuss; and, as literature is an art of words, it should be at least
as easy to find words to describe them as to find such words as
sonata or fugue in music.
In literature, as in painting, the traditional emphasis in both
practice and theory has been on representation or 'lifelikeness/'
When, for instance, we pick up a novel of Dickens, our immediate
impulse, a habit fostered in us by all the criticism we know, is to
compare it with “life,’' whether as lived by us or by Dickens's con-
temporaries. Then we meet such characters as Heep or Quilp, and,
as neither we nor the Victorians have ever known anything much
“like” these curious monsters, the method promptly breaks down.
Some readers will complain that Dickens has relapsed into “mere”
caricature (as though caricature were easy); others, more sensibly,
simply give up the criterion of lifelikeness and enjoy the creation
for its own sake.
The structural principles of painting are frequently described in
terms of their analogues in plane geometry (or solid, by a further
reach of analogy). A famous letter of Cezanne speaks of the ap-
proximation of pictorial form to the sphere and the cube, and the
practice of abstract painters seems to confirm his point. Geometri-
cal shapes are analogous only to pictorial forms, not by any means
identical with them; the real structural principles of painting are
to be derived, not from an external analogy with something else,
but from the internal analogy of the art itself. Tl^ ^tructuralj)r in-
ciplesofl^erature,jimilarly^^ be deriye^ronTamE^^iarand
S ^~^cTnficism^jhe only kindstiiaFis sume a larger co ntext of
u^e as a w hole. But we saw in fEe first essay tha^’E? the
modes of fiction move from the mythical to the low mimetic and
ironic, they approach a point of extreme “realism” or representa-
tive likeness to life. It follows that the mythical mode, the stories
about gods, in which characters have the greatest possible power of
action, is the most abstract and conventionalized of all literary
modes, just as the corresponding modes in other arts— religious
Byzantine painting, for example-show the highest degree of styli-
zation in their structure. Hence the structural principles of literature
are as closely related to mythology and comparative religion as
THEORY OF MYTHS
those of painting are to geometry. In this essay we shall be using
the symbolism of the Bible, and to a lesser extent Classical mythol-
ogy, as a grammar of literary archetypes.
In the Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers, thought to be the
source of the Potiphar's wife story in the Joseph legend, an elder
brother's wife attempts to seduce an unmarried younger brother who
lives with them, and, when he resists her, accuses him of attempting
to rape her. Tlie younger brother is then forced to run away, with
the enraged elder brother in pursuit. So far, the incidents reproduce
more or less credible facts of life. Then the younger brother prays
to Ra for assistance, pleading the justice of his cause; Ra places
a large lake between him and his brother, and, in a burst of divine
exuberance, fills it full of crocodiles. This incident is no more a
fictional episode than anything that has preceded it, nor is it less
logically related than any other episode to the plot as a whole.
But it has given up the external analogy to “life”: this, we say,
is the kind of thing that happens only in stories. The Egyptian
tale has acquired, then, in its mythical episode, an abstractly literary
quality; and, as the story-teller could just as easily have solved
his little problem in a more “realistic” way, it appears that literature
in Egypt, like the other arts, preferred a certain degree of stylization.
Similarly, a medieval saint with a huge decorated halo around
his head may look like an old man, but the mythical feature, the
halo, both imparts a more abstract structure to the painting and
gives the saint the kind of appearance that one sees only in pic-
tures. In primitive societies, a flourishing development in myth
and folk tale usually accompanies a taste for geometrical ornament
in the plastic arts. In our tradition we have a place for verisimili-
tude, for human experience skilfully and consistently imitated.
The occasional hoaxes in which fiction is presented, or even accepted,
as fact, such as Defoe's Joumd of the Plague Year or Samuel
Butler's The Fair Haveriy correspond to trompe Voeil illusions in
painting. At the other extreme we have myths, or abstract fictional
designs in which gods and other such beings do whatever they
like, which in practice means whatever the story-teller likes. The
return of irony to myth that we noted in the first essay is con-
temporary with, and parallel to, abstraction, expressionism, cubism,
and similar efforts in painting to emphasize the self-contained
pictorial structure. Sixty years ago, Bernard Shaw stressed the social
significance of the themes in Ibsen's plays and his own. Today,
^35
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
Mr. Eliot calls our attention to the Alcestis archetype in The
Cocktail Party, to the Ion archetype in The Confidential Clerk. The
former is of the age of Manet and Degas; the latter of the age
of Braque and Graham Sutherland.
We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth,
an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design,
unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience.
In terms of narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at
the conceivable limits of desire. The gods enjoy beautiful women,
fight one another with prodigious strength, comfort and assist man,
or else watch his miseries from the height of their immortal free-
dom. The fact that myth operates at the top level of human desire
does not mean that it necessarily presents its world as attained or
attainable by human beings. In terms of meaning or dianoia, myth
is the same world looked at as an area or field of activity, bearing
in mind our principle that the meaning or pattern of poetry is a
structure of imagery with conceptual implications. The world of
mythical imagery is usually represented by the conception of heaven
or Paradise in religion, and it is apocalyptic, in the sense of that
word already explained, a world of total metaphor, in which every-
thing is potentially identical with everything else, as though it were
all inside a single infinite body.
Realism, or the art of verisimilitude, evokes the response "'How
like that is to what we know!'' When what is written is like what
is known, we have an art of extended or implied simile. And as
realism is an art of implicit simile, myth is an art of implicit meta-
phorical identity. The word "sun-god,'^ with a hyphen used in-
stead of a predicate, is a pure ideogram, in Pound's terminology, or
literal metaphor, in ours. In myth we see the structural principles
of literature isolated; in realism we see the same structural prin-
ciples (not similar ones) fitting into a context of plausibility. (Simi-
larly in music, a piece by Purcell and a piece by Benjamin Britten
may not be in the least like each other, but if they are both in D
major their tonality will be the same.) The presence of a mythical
structure in realistic fiction, however, poses certain technical prob-
lems for making it plausible, and the devices used in solving these
problems may be given the general name of displacement
Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the
other, and in between lies the whole area of romance, using that
term to mean, not the historical mode of the first essay, but the
136
THEORY OF MYTHS
tendency, noted later in the same essay, to displace myth in a
human direction and yet, in contrast to ''realism,” to convention-
alize content in an idealized direction. The central principle of dis-
placement is that what can be metaphorically identified in a myth
can only be linked in romance by some form of simile: analogy,
significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the
like. In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance
we may have a person who is significantly associated with the sun
or trees. In more realistic modes the association becomes less sig-
nificant and more a matter of incidental, even coincidental or ac-
cidental, imagery. In the dragon-killing legend of the St. George
and Perseus family, of which more hereafter, a country under an
old feeble king is terrorized by a dragon who eventually demands
the king's daughter, but is slain by the hero. This seems to be a
romantic analogy (perhaps also, in this case, a descendant) of a
myth of a waste land restored to life by a fertility god. In the myth,
then, the dragon and the old king would be identified. We can in
fact concentrate the myth still further into an Oedipus fantasy in
which the hero is not the old king's son-in-law but his son, and
the rescued damsel the hero's mother. If the story were a private
dream such identifications would be made as a matter of course.
But to make it a plausible, symmetrical, and morally acceptable
story a good deal of displacement is necessary, and it is only after
a comparative study of the story type has been made that the
metaphorical structure within it begins to emerge.
In Hawthorne's The Marble Faun the statue which gives the
story that name is so insistently associated with a character named
Donatello that a reader would have to be unusually dull or inat-
tentive to miss the point that Donatello "is” the statue. Later on
we meet a girl named Hilda, of singular purity and gentleness, who
lives in a tower surrounded by doves. The doves are very fond of
her; another character calls her his "dove,” and remarks indicating
some special affinity with doves are nnade about her by both author
and characters. If we were to say that Hilda is a dove-goddess like
Venus, identified with her doves, we should not be reading the
story quite accurately in its own mode; we should be translating
it into straight myth. But to recognize how close Hawthorne is to
myth here is not unfair. That is, we recognize that The Marble
Faun is not a typical low mimetic fiction: it is dominated by an
interest that looks back to fictional romance and forward to the
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
ironic mythical writers of the next century— to Kafka, for instance,
or Cocteau. This interest is often called allegory, but probably
Hawthorne himself was right in calling it romance. We can see
how this interest tends toward abstraction in character-drawing,
and if we know no other canons than low mimetic ones, we com-
plain of this.
Or, again, we have, in myth, the story of Proserpine, who dis-
appears into the underworld for six months of every year. The pure
myth is clearly one of death and revival; the story as we have it
is slightly displaced, but the mythical pattern is easy to see. The
same structural element often recurs in Shakespearean comedy,
where it has to be adapted to a roughly high mimetic level of
credibility. Hero in Much Ado is dead enough to have a funeral
song, and plausible explanations are postponed until after the end
of the play. Imogen in Cymbeline has an assumed name and an
empty grave, but she too gets some funeral obsequies. But the
story of Hermione and Perdita is so close to the Demeter and
Proserpine myth that hardly any serious pretence of plausible ex-
planations is made. Hermione, after her disappearance, returns
once as a ghost in a dream, and her coming to life from a statue,
a displacement of the Pygmalion myth, is said to require an awak-
ening of faith, even though, on one level of plausibility, she has
not been a statue at all, and nothing has taken place except a
harmless deception. We notice how much more abstractly mythical
a thematic writer can be than a fictional one: Spenser's Florimell,
for instance, disappears under the sea for the winter with no ques-
tions asked, leaving a “snowy lady" in her place and returning with
a great outburst of spring floods at the end of the fourth book.
In the low mimetic, we recognize the same structural pattern
of the death and revival of the heroine when Esther Summerson
gets smallpox, or Lorna Doone is shot at her marriage altar. But
we are getting closer to the conventions of realism, and although
Lorna's eyes are “dim with death," we know that the author does
not really mean death if he is planning to revive her. Here again
it is interesting to compare The Marble Faun, where there is so
much about sculptors and the relation of statues to living people
that we almost expect some kind of denouement like that of The
Winter's Tale. Hilda mysteriously disappears, and during her ab-
sence her lover, the sculptor Kenyon, digs out of the earth a
138
THEORY OF MYTHS
statue that he associates with Hilda, After that Hilda returns, with
a plausible reason eventually assigned for her absence, but not
without some rather pointed and petulant remarlcs from Hawthorne
himself to the effect that he has no interest in concocting plausible
explanations, and that he wishes his reading public would give him
a bit more freedom. Yet Hawthorne’s inhibitions seem to be at
least in part self-imposed, as we can see if we turn to Poe’s Ligeia,
where the straight mythical death and revival pattern is given with-
out apology. Poe is clearly a more radical abstractionist than Haw-
thorne, which is one reason why his influence on our century is
more immediate.
This afhnity between the mythical and the abstractly literary
illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more popular
fiction which is realistic enough to be plausible in its incidents and
yet romantic enough to be a “good story,” which means a clearly
designed one. The introduction of an omen or portent, or the devi<^
of making a whole story the fulfilment of a prophecy given at the
beginning, is an example. Such a device suggests, in its existential
projection, a conception of ineluctable fate or hidden omnipotent
will. Actually, it is a piece of pure literary design, giving the be-
ginning some symmetrical relationship with the end, and the only
ineluctable will involved is that of the author. Hence we often find
it even in writers not temperamentally much in sympathy with
the portentous. In Anna Karenina, for instance, the death of the
railway porter in the opening book is accepted by Anna as an omen
for herself. Similarly, if we find portents and omens in Sophocles,
they are there primarily because they fit the structure of his type
of dramatic tragedy, and prove nothing about any clear-cut beliefs
in fate held by either dramatist or audience.
We have, then, three organizations of myths and archetypal
symbols in literature. First, there is undisplaced myth, generally
concerned with gods or demons, and which takes the form of two
contrasting worlds of total metaphorical identification, one desira-
ble and the other undesirable. These worlds are often identified
with the existential heavens and hells of the religions contemporary
with such literature. These two forms of metaphorical mrganizatkm
we call the apocalyptic and the demonic respectively. Sea>nd, we
have the general tendency we have called romantic, the tendency
to suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more dosdy asso-
139
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
ciated with human experience. Third, we have the tendency of
“realism"' (my distaste for this inept term is reflected in the quo-
tation marks) to throw the emphasis on content and representation
rather than on the shape of the story. Ironic literature begins with
realism and tends toward myth, its mythical patterns being as a
rule more suggestive of the demonic than of the apocalyptic, though
sometimes it simply continues the romantic tradition of stylization.
Hawthorne, Poe, Conrad, Hardy and Virginia Woolf all provide
examples.
In looking at a picture, we may stand close to it and analyze the
details of brush work and palette knife. This corresponds roughly
to the rhetorical analysis of the new critics in literature. At a little
distance back, the design comes into clearer view, and we study
rather the content represented: this is the best distance for realistic
Dutch pictures, for example, where we are in a sense reading the
picture. The further back we go, the more conscious we are of the
organizing design. At a great distance from, say, a Madonna, we
can see nothing but the archetype of the Madonna, a large cen-
tripetal blue mass with a contrasting point of interest at its center.
In the criticism of literature, too, we often have to “stand back"
from the poem to see its archetypal organization. If we “stand
back" from Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantoes, we see a background
of ordered circular light and a sinister black mass thrusting up into
the lower foreground— much the same archetypal shape that we
see in the opening of the Book of Job. If we “stand back" from
the beginning of the fifth act of Hamlet, we see a grave opening
on the stage, the hero, his enemy, and the heroine descending into
it, followed by a fatal struggle in the upper world. If we “stand
back" from a realistic novel such as Tolstoy's Resurrection or
Zola's Germinal, we can see the mythopoeic designs indicated by
those titles. Other examples will be given in what follows.
We proceed to give an account first of the structure of imagery,
or dianoia, of the two undisplaced worlds, the apocalyptic and the
demonic, drawing heavily on the Bible, the main source for un-
displaced myth in our tradition. Then we go on to the two inter-
mediate structures of imagery, and finally to the generic narratives
or mythoi which are these structures of imagery in movement.
140
THEORY OF MYTHS
THEORY OF ARCHETYPAL MEANING (i):
APOCALYPTIC IMAGERY
Let us proceed according to the general scheme of the game of
Twenty Questions, or, if we prefer, of the Great Chain of Being, the
traditional scheme for classifying sense data.
The apocalyptic world, the heaven of religion, presents, in the
first place, the categories of reality in the forms of human desire,
as indicated by the forms they assume under the work of human
civilization. The form imposed by human work and desire on the
vegetable world, for instance, is that of the garden, the farm, the
grove, or the park. The human form of the animal world is a world
of domesticated animals, of which the sheep has a traditional prior-
ity in both Classical and Christian metaphor. The human form of
the mineral world, the form into which human work transforms
stone, is the city. The city, the garden, and the sheepfold are the or-
ganizing metaphors of the Bible and of most Christian symbolism,
and they are brought into complete metaphorical identification in
the book explicitly called the Apocalypse or Revelation, which has
been carefully designed to form an undisplaced mythical conclusion
for the Bible as a whole. From our point of view this means that
the Biblical Apocalypse is our grammar of apocalyptic imagery.
Each of these three categories, the city, the garden, and the
sheepfold, is, by the principle of archetypal metaphor dealt with
in the previous essay, and which we remember is the concrete uni-
versal, identical with the others and with each individual within it.
Hence the divine and human worlds are, similarly, identical with
the sheepfold, city and garden, and the social and individual aspects
of each are identical. Thus the apocalyptic world of the Bible
presents the following pattern:
divine world = society of gods = One God
human world = society of men = One Man
animal world = sheepfold = One Lamb
vegetable world = garden or park = One Tree (of Life)
mineral world = city = One Building, Temple,
Stone
The conception *'Chrisf ' unites all these categories in identity:
Christ is both the one God and the one Man, the Lamb of God,
the tree of life, or vine of which we are the branches, the stone
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
which the builders rejected, and the rebuilt temple which is
identical with his risen body. The religious and poetic identifica-
tions differ in intention only, the former being existential and the
latter metaphorical. In medieval criticism the difference was of
little importance, and the word ''figura,'' as applied to the identi-
fication of a symbol with Christ, usually implies both kinds.
Now let us expand this pattern a little. In Christianity the con-
crete universal is applied to the divine world in the form of the
Trinity. Christianity insists that, whatever dislocations of customary
mental processes may be involved, God is three persons and yet one
God. The conceptions of person and substance represent a few of
the difficulties in extending metaphor to logic. In pure metaphor,
of course, the unity of God could apply to five or seventeen or a
million divine persons as easily as three, and we may find the divine
concrete universal in poetry outside the Trinitarian orbit. When
Zeus remarks, at the beginning of the eighth book of the Iliad,
that he can pull the whole chain of being up into himself when-
ever he likes, we can see that for Homer there was some conception
of a double perspective in Olympus, where a group of squabbling
deities may at any time suddenly compose into the form of a single
divine will. In Virgil we first meet a malicious and spoiled Juno,
but the comment of Aeneas to his men a few lines later on, *'deus
dabit his quoque finem,” indicates that a similar double perspective
existed for him. We may compare perhaps the Book of Job, where
Job and his friends are much too devout for it ever to occur to them
that Job could have suffered so as a result of a half-jocular bet
between God and Satan. There is a sense in which they are right,
and the information given to the reader about Satan in heaven
wrong. Satan is dropped out of the end of the poem, and whatever
rewritings may be responsible for this, it is still difficult to see how
the final enlightenment of Job could ever have returned completely
from the conception of a single divine will to the mood of the open-
ing scene.
As for human society, the metaphor that we are all members of
one body has organized most political theory from Plato to our ovm
day. Milton's “A Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge
Christian personage, one mighty growth, and stature of an honest
man" belongs to a Christianized version of this metaphor, in which,
as in the doctrine of the Trinity, the full metaphorical statement
'‘Christ is God and Man" is orthodox, and the Arian and Docetic
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THEORY OF MYTHS
statements in terms of simile or likeness condemned as heretical.
Hobbes's Leviathan, with its original frontispiece depicting a num-
ber of mannikins inside the body of a single giant, has also some
connection with the same type of identification. Plato's Republic,
in which the reason, will, and desire of the individual appear as the
philosopher-king, guards, and artisans of the state, is also founded
on this metaphor, which in fact we still use whenever we speak of
a group or aggregate of human beings as a "'body."
In sexual symbolism, of course, it is still easier to employ the
"one flesh" metaphor of two bodies made into the same body by
love. Donne's The Extasie is one of the many poems organized
on this image, and Shakespeare's Phoenix and the Turtle makes
great play with the outrage done to the "reason" by such identity.
Themes of loyalty, hero-worship, faithful followers, and the like
also employ the same metaphor.
The animal and vegetable worlds are identified with each other,
and with the divine and human worlds as well, in the Christian
doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the essential human forms
of the vegetable world, food and drink, the harvest and the vintage,
the bread and the wine, are the body and blood of the Lamb who
is also Man and God, and in whose body we exist as in a city or
temple. -Here again the orthodox doctrine insists on metaphor as
against simile, and here again the conception of substance illustrates
the struggles of logic to digest the metaphor. It is clear from the
opening of the Lows that the symposium had something of the
same communion symbolism for Plato. It would be hard to find a
simpler or more vivid image of human civilization, where man at-
tempts to surround nature and put it inside his (social) body, than
the sacramental meal.
The conventional honors accorded the sheep in the animal world
provide us with the central archetype of pastoral imagery, as well as
with such metaphors as "pastor” and "flock" in religion. The met-
aphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient
Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the
fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stam-
peded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. But
of course in pK>etry any other animal would do as well if the poet's
audience were prepared for it: at the opening of the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad, for instance, the sacrificial horse, whose body contains
the whole universe, is treated in the same way that a Christian poet
THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
would treat the Lamb of God. Of birds, too, the dove has tradi-
tionally represented the universal concord or love both of Venus
and of the Christian Holy Spirit. Identifications of gods with ani-
mals or plants and of those again with human society form the
basis of totemic symbolism. Certain types of etiological folk tale,
the stories of how supernatural beings were turned into the animals
and plants that we know, represent an attentuated form of the
same type of metaphor, and survive as the ''metamorphosis” arche-
type familiar from Ovid.
Similar flexibility is possible with vegetable images. Elsewhere
in the Bible the leaves or fruit of the tree of life are used as com-
munion symbols in place of the bread and wine. Or the concrete
universal may be applied not simply to a tree but to a single fruit
or flower. In the West the rose has a traditional priority among
apocalyptic flowers: the use of the rose as a communion symbol in
the Paradiso comes readily to mind, and in the first book of The
Faerie Queene the emblem of St. George, a red cross on a white
ground, is connected not only with the risen body of Christ and
the sacramental symbolism which accompanies it, but with the
union of the red and white roses in the Tudor dynasty. In the East
the lotus or the Chinese "golden flower” often occupied the place
of the rose, and in German Romanticism the blue cornflower en-
joyed a brief vogue.
The identity of the human body and the vegetable world gives
us the archetype of Arcadian imagery, of Marvell's green world, of
Shakespeare's forest comedies, of the world of Robin Hood and
other green men who lurk in the forests of romance, these last the
counterparts in romance of the metaphorical myth of the tree-god.
In Marvell's The Garden we meet a further but still conventional
extension in the identification of the human soul with a bird sitting
in the branches of the tree of life. The olive tree and its oil has sup-
plied another identification in the "anointed” ruler.
The city, whether called Jerusalem or not, is apocalyptically iden-
tical with a single building or temple, a "house of many mansions,”
of which individuals are "lively stones,” to use another New Testa-
ment phrase. The human use of the inorganic world involves the
highway or road as well as the city with its streets, and the metaphor
of the “way” is inseparable from all quest-literature, whether ex-
plicitly Christian as in The Pilgrim's Progress or not. To this cate-
144
THEORY OF MYTHS
gory also belong geometrical and architectural images: the tower
and the winding stairway of Dante and Yeats, Jacob's ladder, the
ladder of the Neo-platonic love poets, the ascending spiral or cor-
nucopia, the "'stately pleasure dome" that Kubla Khan decreed, the
cross and quincunx patterns which Browne sought in every corner
of art and nature, the circle as the emblem of eternity, Vaughan's
"ring of pure and endless light,” and so on.
On the archetypal level proper, where poetry is an artifact of
human civilization, nature is the container of man. On the anagogic
level, man is the container of nature, and his cities and gardens are
no longer little hollowings on the surface of the earth, but the forms
of a human universe. Hence in apocalyptic symbolism we cannot
confine man only to his two natural elements of earth and air, and,
in going from one level to the other, symbolism must, like Tamino
in The Magic Flute, pass the ordeals of water and fire. Poetic sym-
bolism usually puts fire just above man's life in this woild, and water
just below it. Dante had to pass through a ring of fire and the river
of Eden to go from the mountain of purgatory, which is still on the
surface of our own world, to Paradise or the apocalyptic world
proper. The imagery of light and fire surrounding the angels in the
Bible, the tongues of flame descending at Pentecost, and the coal
of fire applied to the mouth of Isaiah by the seraph, associates fire
with a spiritual or angelic world midway between the human and
the divine. In Classical mythology the story of Prometheus indi-
cates a similar provenance for fire, as does the association of Zeus
with the thunderbolt or fire of lightning. In short, heaven in the
sense of the sky, containing the fiery bodies of sun, moon, and stars,
is usually identified with, or thought of as the passage to, the heaven
of the apocalyptic world.
Hence all our other categories can be identified with fire or thought
of as burning. The appearance of the Judaeo-Christian deity in fire,
surrounded by angels of fire (seraphim) and light (cherubim),
needs only to be mentioned. The burning animal of the ritual of
sacrifice, the incorporating of an animal body in a communion be-
tween divine and human worlds, modulates into all the imagery
connected with the fire and smoke of the altar, ascending incense,
and the like. The burning man is represented in the saint's halo and
the king's crown, both of which are analogues of the sun-god: one
may compare also the "burning babe” of Southwell's Christmas
145
THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
poem. The image of the burning bird appears in the legendary phoe-
nix. The tree of life may also be a burning tree, the unconsumed
burning bush of Moses, the candlestick of Jewish ritual, or the
“rosy cross'" of later occultism. In alchemy the vegetable, mineral,
and water worlds are identified in its rose, stone, and elixir; flower
and jewel archetypes are identified in the “jewel in the lotus'^ of
the Buddhist prayer. The links between fire, intoxicating wine, and
the hot red blood of animals are also common.
The identification of the city with fire explains why the city of
God in the Apocalypse is presented as a glowing mass of gold and
precious stones, each stone presumably burning with a hard gem-
like flame. For in apocalyptic symbolism the fiery bodies of heaven,
sun, moon, and stars, are all inside the universal divine and human
body. The symbolism of alchemy is apocalyptic symbolism of the
same type: the center of nature, the gold and jewels hidden in the
earth, is eventually to be united to its circumference in the sun,
moon, and stars of the heavens; the center of the spiritual world,
the soul of man, is united to its circumference in God. Hence there
is a close association between the purifying of the human soul and
the transmuting of earth to gold, not only literal gold but the fiery
quintessential gold of which the heavenly bodies are made. The
golden tree with its mechanical bird in Sailing to Byzantium identi-
fies vegetable and mineral worlds in a form reminiscent of alchemy.
Water, on the other hand, traditionally belongs to a realm of
existence below human life, the state of chaos or dissolution which
follows ordinary death, or the reduction to the inorganic. Hence the
soul frequently crosses water or sinks into it at death. In apocalyptic
symbolism we have the “water of life,"' the fourfold river of Eden
which reappears in the City of God, and is represented in ritual by
baptism. According to Ezekiel the return of this river turns the sea
fresh, which is apparently why the author of Revelation says that
in the apocalypse there is no more sea. Apocalyptically, therefore,
water circulates in the universal body like the blood in the indi-
vidual body. Perhaps we should say “is held within"’ instead of
“circulates,"" to avoid the anachronism of connecting a knowledge
of the circulation of the blood with Biblical themes. For centuries,
of course, the blood was one of four “humors,"" or bodily liquids,
just as the river of life was traditionally fourfold.
146
THEORY OF MYTHS
THEORY OF ARCHETYPAL MEANING (2):
DEMONIC IMAGERY
Opposed to apocalyptic symbolism is the presentation of the
world that desire totally rejects: the world of the nightmare and
the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion; the world as it is
before the human imagination begins to work on it and before any
image of human desire, such as the city or the garden, has been
solidly established; the world also of perverted or wasted work, ruins
and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly. And
just as apocalyptic imagery in poetry is closely associated with a re-
ligious heaven, so its dialectic opposite is closely linked with an
existential hell, like Dante’s Inferno^ or with the hell that man
creates on earth, as in 1984, No Exit, and Darkness at Noon,
where the titles of the last two speak for themselves. Hence one
of the central themes of demonic imagery is parody, the mocking
of the exuberant play of art by su^esting its imitation in terms of
“real life.”
The demonic divine world largely personifies the vast, menacing,
stupid powers of nature as they appear to a technologically unde-
veloped society. Symbols of heaven in such a world tend to become
associated with the inaccessible sky, and the central idea that crys-
tallizes from it is the idea of inscrutable fate or external necessity.
The machinery of fate is administered by a set of remote invisible
gods, whose freedom and pleasure are ironic because they exclude
man, and who intervene in human affairs chiefly to safeguard their
own prerogatives. They demand sacrifices, punish presumption, and
enforce obedience to natural and moral law as an end in itself.
Here we are not trying to describe, for instance, the gods in Greek
tragedy: we are trying to isolate the sense of human remoteness
and futility in relation to the divine order which is only one element
among others in most tragic visions of life, though an essential one
in all. In later ages poets become much more outspoken about
this view of divinity: Blake’s Nobodaddy, Shelley’s Jupiter, Swin-
burne’s “supreme evil, God,” Hardy’s befuddled Will, and Hous-
man’s “brute and blackguard” are examples.
The demonic human world is a society held together by a kind of
molecular tension of egos, a loyalty to the group or the leader which
diminishes the individual, or, at best, contrasts his pleasure with
his duty or honor. Such a society is an endless source of tragic di-
147
THIRD essay: archetypal criticism
lemmas like those of Hamlet and Antigone. In the apocalyptic con-
ception of human life we found three kinds of fulfilment: indi-
vidual, sexual, and social. In the sinister human world one individual
pole is the tyrant-leader, inscrutable, ruthless, melancholy, and
with an insatiable will, who commands loyalty only if he is ego-
centric enough to represent the collective ego of his followers. T^e
other pole is represented by the pharmdkos or sacrificed victim,
who has to be killed to strengthen the others. In the most con-
centrated form of the demonic parody, the two become the same.
The ritual of the killing of the divine king in Frazer, whatever it
may be in anthropology, is in literary criticism the demonic or un-
displaced radical form of tragic and ironic structures.
In religion the spiritual world is a reality distinct from the physi-
cal world. In poetry the physical or actual is opposed, not to the
spiritually existential, but to ^'he hypothetical. We met in the first
essay the principle that the transmutation of act into mime, the
advance from acting out a rite to playing at the rite, is one of the
central features of the development from savagery into culture. It
is easy to see a mimesis of conflict in tennis and football, but,
precisely for that very reason, tennis and football players represent
a culture superior to the culture of student duellists and gladiators.
The turning of literal act into play is a fundamental form of the
liberalizing of life which appears in more intellectual levels as lib-
eral education, the release of fact into imagination. It is consistent
with this that the Eucharist symbolism of the apocalyptic world,
the metaphorical identification of vegetable, animal, human, and
divine bodies, should have the imagery of cannibalism for its de-
monic parody. Dante's last vision of human hell is of Ugolino
gnawing his tormentor's skull; Spenser's last major allegorical vi-
sion is of Serena stripped and prepared for a cannibal feast. The
imagery of cannibalism usually includes, not only images of torture
and mutilation, but of what is technically known as sparagmos or
the tearing apart of the sacrificial body, an image found in the
myths of Osiris, Orpheus, and Pentheus. The cannibal giant or
ogre of folk tales, who enters literature as Polyphemus, belongs
here, as does a long series of sinister dealings with flesh and blood
from the story of Thyestes to Shylock's bond. Here again the form
described by Frazer as the historically original form is in literary
criticism the radical demonic form. Flaubert's Salammbo is a study
1^8
THEORY OF MYTHS
of demonic imagery which was thought in its day to be archaeo-
logical but turned out to be prophetic.
The demonic erotic relation becomes a fierce destructive passion
that works against loyalty or frustrates the one who possesses it.
It is generally symbolized by a harlot, w itch^ siren^ or other tanta-
lizing female^, a physical object of desire which is sought as ^
pbSession and therefore can never be possessed. The demonic
parody of marriage, or the union of two souls in one flesh, may
take the form of hermaphroditism, incest (the most common
form), or homosexuality. The social relation is that of the mob,
which is essentially human society looking for a pharmakos, and
the mob is often identified with some sinister animal image such as
the hydra, Virgil's Fama, or its development in Spenser's Blatant
Beast.
The other worlds can be briefly summarized. The animal world
is portrayed in terms of monsters or beasts of prey. The wolf, the
traditional enemy of the sheep, the tiger, the vulture, the cold and
earth-bound serpent, and the dragon are all common. In the Bible,
where the demonic society is represented by Egypt and Babylon,
the rulers of each are identified with monstrous beasts: Nebuchad-
nezzar turns into a beast in Daniel, and Pharaoh is called a river-
dragon by Ezekiel. The dragon is especially appropriate because it
is not only monstrous and sinister but fabulous, and so represents
the paradoxical nature of evil as a moral fact and an eternal nega-
tion. In the Apocalypse the dragon is called “the beast that was,
and is not, and yet is."
The vegetable world is a sinister forest like the ones we meet in
Comus or the opening of the Inferno, or a heath, which from
Shakespeare to Hardy has been associated with tragic destiny, or
a wilderness like that of Browning's Childe Roland or Eliot's Waste
Land. Or it may be a sinister enchanted garden like that of Circe
and its Renaissance descendants in Tasso and Spenser. In the Bible
the waste land appears in its concrete universal form in the tree of
death, the tree of forbidden knowledge in Genesis, the barren fig-
tree of the Gospels, and the cross. The stake, with the hcK>ded
heretic, the black man or the witch attached to it, is the burning
tree and body of the infernal world. Scaffolds, gallows, stocks, pil-
lories, whips, and birch rods are or could be modulations. The con-
trast of the tree of life and the tree of death is beautifully expressed
in Yeats's poem The Two Trees.
149
THIRD essay: archetypal criticism
The inorganic world may remain in its unworked form of deserts,
rocks, and waste land. Cities of destruction and dreadful night
belong here, and the great ruins of pride, from the tower of Babel
to the mighty works of Ozymandias. Images of perverted work be-
long here too: engines of torture, weapons of war, armor, and
images of a dead mechanism which, because it does not humanize
nature, is unnatural as well as inhuman. Corresponding to the
temple or One Building of the apocalypse, we have the prison or
dungeon, the sealed furnace of heat without light, like the City of
Dis in Dante. Here too are the sinister counterparts of geometrical
images: the sinister spiral (the maelstrom, whirlpool, or Charyb-
dis), the sinister cross, and the sinister circle, the wheel of fate or
fortune. The identification of the circle with the serpent, conven-
tionally a demonic animal, gives us the ouroboros, or serpent with
its tail in its mouth. Corresponding to the apocalyptic way or
straight road, the highway in the desert for God prophesied by
Isaiah, we have in this world the labyrinth or maze, the image of
lost direction, often with a monster at its heart like the Minotaur.
The labyrinthine wanderings of Israel in the desert, repeated by
Jesus when in the company of the devil (or “wild beasts,” accord-
ing to Mark), fit the same pattern. The labyrinth can also be a
sinister forest, as in Comm. The catacombs are efifectively used in
the same context in The Marble Faun, and of course in a further
concentration of metaphor, the maze would become the winding
entrails inside the sinister monster himself.
The world of fire is a world of malignant demons like the will-
o’-the-wisps, or spirits broken from hell, and it appears in this world
in the form of the auto da fe, as mentioned, or such burning cities
as Sodom. It is in contrast to the purgatorial or cleansing fire, like
the fiery furnace in Daniel. The world of water is the water of
death, often identified with spilled blood, as in the Passion and
in Dante's symbolic figure of history, and above all the “unplumbed,
salt, estranging sea,” which absorbs all rivers in this world, but dis-
appears in the apocalypse in favor of a circulation of fresh water.
In the Bible the sea and the animal monster are identified in the
figure of the leviathan, a sea-monster also identified with the social
tyrannies of Babylon and Egypt.
THEORY OF MYTHS
THEORY OF ARCHETYPAL MEANING (3) :
ANALOGICAL IMAGERY
Most imagery in poetry has of course to deal with much less ex-
treme worlds than the two which are usually projected as the
eternal unchanging worlds of heaven and hell. Apocalyptic imagery
is appropriate to the mythical mode, and demonic imager)^ to the
ironic mode in the late phase in which it returns to myth. In the
other three modes these two structures operate dialectically, pulling
the reader toward the metaphorical and mythical undisplaced core
of the work. We should therefore expect three intermediate struc-
tures of imagery, corresponding roughly to the romantic, high
mimetic, and low mimetic modes. We shall give little attention to
high mimetic imagery, however, in order to preserve the simpler
pattern of the romantic and ‘'realistic” tendencies within the two
undisplaced structures given at the beginning of this essay.
These three structures are less rigorously metaphorical, and are
rather significant constellations of images, which, when found to-
gether, make up what is often called, somewhat helplessly, “at-
mosphere.” The mode of romance presents an idealized world: in
romance heroes are brave, heroines beautiful, villains villainous,
and the frustrations, ambiguities, and embarrassments of ordinary
life are made little of. Hence its imagery presents a human counter-
part of the apocalyptic world which we may call the analogy of in-
nocence. It is best known to us, not from the age of romance itself,
but from later romanticizings: Comus, The Tempest, and the third
book of The Faerie Queene in the Renaissance; Blake^s songs of
innocence and “Beulah” imagery, Keats's Endymion and Shelley's
Epipsychidion in the Romantic period proper.
In the analogy of innocence the divine or spiritual figures are
usually parental, wise old men with magical powers like Prospero,
or friendly guardian spirits like Raphael before Adam's fall. Among
the human figures children are prominent, and so is the virtue most
closely associated with childhood and the state of innocence-chas-
tity, a virtue which in this structure of imagery usually includes
virginity. In Comus the Lady's chastity is, like Prospero's wisdom,
associated with magic, as is the invincible chastity of Spenser's
Britomart. It is easiest to associate with young women— Dante's
Matelda and Shakespeare's Miranda are examples— but male chas-
tity is important too, as the Grail romances show. Sir Galahad's
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
remark in Tennyson about his purity of heart giving him tenfold
strength is consistent with the imagery of the world he belongs in.
Fire in the innocent world is usually a purifying symbol, a world
of flame that none but the perfectly chaste can pass, as in Spenser's
castle of Busirane, the refining fire at the top of Dante's purgatory,
and the flaming sword that keeps the fallen Adam and Eve away
from Paradise. In the story of the sleeping beauty, which belongs
here, the wall of flame is replaced by one of thorns and brambles:
Wagner's Die Walkilre, however, retains the fire, to the discom-
posure of stage managers. The moon, the coolest and hence most
chaste of all the fiery heavenly bodies, has a special importance for
this world.
Of animals, the most obvious are the pastoral sheep and lambs,
along with the horses and hounds of romance, in their gentler as-
pects of fidelity and devotion. The unicorn, the traditional emblem
of chastity and the lover of virgins, has an honored place here; so
does the dolphin, whose association with Arion makes him the
innocent contrast to the devouring leviathan; and also, for its
humility and submissiveness, a very different animal— the ass. The
dramatic festival of the ass, no less than that of the Boy Bishop,
belongs to this structure of imagery, and when Shakespeare put an
ass's head in Fairyland he was not doing something unique, as
Robinson’s poem implies, but following a tradition that goes back
to the transformed Lucius listening to the story of Cupid and
Psyche in Apuleius. Birds, butterflies (for this is Psyche's world,
and Psyche means butterfly), and spirits with their qualities, like
Ariel and Hudson’s Rima, are other naturalized denizens.
The paradisal garden and the tree of life belong in the apocalyp-
tic structure, as we saw, but the garden of Eden itself, as presented
in the Bible and Milton, belongs rather to this one, and Dante
puts it just below his Paradiso. Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis, from
which the attendant spirit in Comus comes, are parallel, along with
all the medieval developments of the theme of the locus amoenus.
Of special significance is the symbol of the body of the Virgin as a
horius conclusus, derived from the Song of Songs. A romantic coun-
terpart to the tree of life appears in the magician’s life-giving wand,
and such parallel symbols as the blossoming rod in Tannhaiiser.
Cities are more alien to the pastoral and rural spirit of this world,
and the tower and the castle, with an occasional cottage or hermit-
age, are the chief images of habitation. Water symbolism features
152
THEORY OF MYTHS
chiefly fountains and pools, fertilizing rains, and an occasional
stream separating a man from a woman and so preserving the chas-
tity of each, like the river of Lethe in Dante. The opening rose-
garden episode of Burnt Norton gives a brief but extraordinarily
complete summary of the symbols of the analogy of innocence; one
may also compare the second section of Auden's Kairos and Logos.
The innocent world is neither totally alive, like the apocalyptic
one, nor mostly dead, like ours: it is an animistic world, full of
elemental spirits. All the characters of Comus are elemental spirits
except the Lady and her brothers, and the connections of Ariel
with air-spirits, of Puck with fire-spirits (Burton says of fire-spirits
that “we commonly call them Pucks"), and of Caliban with earth-
spirits are clear enough. In Spenser we find Florimell and Marinell,
whose names indicate that they are spirits of flowers and water, a
Proserpine and an Adonis. Often, too, as in Comus and the Nativity
Ode, innocent or unfallen nature, nature as a divinely sanctioned
order, is represented by the inaudible harmony of the music of the
spheres.
Just as the organizing ideas of romance are chastity and magic,
so the organizing ideas of the high mimetic area seem to be love
and form. And as the field of romantic images may be called an
analogy of innocence, so the field of high mimetic imagery may be
called an analogy of nature and reason. We find here the emphasis
on cynosure or centripetal gaze, and the tendency to idealize the
human representatives of the divine and the spiritual world, which
are characteristic of the high mimetic. Divinity hedges the king and
the Courtly Love mistress is a goddess; love of both is an educating
and informing power which brings one into unity with the spiritual
and divine worlds. The fire of the angelic world blazes in the king's
crown and the lady's eyes. The animals are those of proud beauty:
the eagle and the lion stand for the vision of the royal by the loyal,
the horse and falcon for “chivalry" or the aristocracy on horseback;
the peacock and the swan are the birds of cynosure, and the phoenix
or unique fire-bird is a favorite poetic emblem, especially, in Eng-
land, for Queen Elizabeth. Garden symbolism recedes into the back-
ground, as city symbolism does in romance; there are formal Ar-
dens in close association with buildings, but the idea of a garden
world is still a romantic one. The magician's wand is metamor-
phosed into the royal sceptre, and the magic tree to the fluttering
banner. The city is preeminently the capital dty, with the cx>iirt
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
at its center and a series of initiatory degrees of approach within
the court, climaxed by the royal “presence/' We note that as we
go down the modes an increasing number of poetic images are
taken from actual social conditions of life. Water-symbolism cen-
ters on the disciplined river, in England the Thames which runs
softly in Spenser and in neo-Classical rhythms in Denham, a river
whose most appropriate ornament is the royal barge.
In the low mimetic area we enter a world that we may call the
analogy of experience, and which bears a relation to the demonic
world corresponding to the relation of the romantic innocent world
to the apocalyptic one. Except for this potentially ironic connec-
tion, and except for a certain number of hieratic or specially indi-
cated symbols like Hawthorne's scarlet letter and Henry James's
golden bowl and ivory tower, the images are the ordinary images
of experience, and need no further explanation here beyond a few
comments about some particular features that may be of use. The
organizing low mimetic ideas seem to be genesis and work. Divine
and spiritual beings have little functional place in low mimetic
fiction, and in thematic writing they are often deliberately redis-
covered or treated as aesthetic surrogates. The advice is given to
the unborn in Erewhon (apparently close to Butler's own view, as
he repeats the idea in Life and Habit) that if there is a spiritual
world, one should turn one's back on it and find it again in immedi-
ate work. The same doctrine of the rediscovery of faith through
works may be found in Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Shaw. In po-
ets, even in explicitly sacramental ones, there are parallel tenden-
cies. From many points of view there could hardly be a greater
contrast than the contrast between the “motion and a spirit" dis-
covered by Wordsworth in Tintem Abbey and the “chevalier”
discovered by Hopkins in the windhover, yet the tendency to anchor
a spiritual vision in an empirical psychological experience is com-
mon to both.
The low mimetic treatment of human society reflects, of course,
Wordsworth's doctrine that the essential human situations, for the
poet, are the common and typical ones. Along with this goes a
good deal of parody of the idealization of life in romance, a parody
that extends to religious and aesthetic experience. As for the animal
world, Thomas Huxley's reference to the qualities that humanity
shares with the ape and the tiger is a significantly low mimetic
choice. The ape has always been par excellence the mimetic ani-
^54
THEORY OF MYTHS
mal, and long before evolution he was specifically the imitator of
man. The rise of evolution however suggested an analogy of pro-
portion in which present man becomes the ape of his counterpart
in the future, as in Nietzsche^s Zarathustra. Huxley's coupling of
the ape and the tiger recalls the popular belief in the implacable
and invariable ferocity of both apes and ^‘cavemen,” a belief for
which there seems to be little more evidence than for unicorns and
phoenixes, but which, like them, shows a tendency to look at nat-
ural history from within the appropriate framework of poetic meta-
phors. The low mimetic is not a rich field for animal symbolism,
but Huxley's ape and tiger recur in Kipling's Jungle Book, where
the monkeys chatter in the tree-tops to no purpose, like intellectu-
als, while the human animal learns instead the dark predatory wis-
dom of the panther in the jungle below.
Gardens in the low mimetic give place to farms and the painful
labor of the man with the hoe, the peasant or furze cutter who
stands in Hardy as an image of man himself, “slighted and endur-
ing.” Cities take of course the shape of the labyrinthine modern
metropolis, where the main emotional stress is on loneliness and
lack of communication. And just as water symbolism in the world
of innocence consists largely of fountains and running streams, so
low mimetic imagery seeks Conrad's “destructive element” the sea,
generally with some humanized leviathan or bateau me on it of
any size from the Titanic in Hardy to the capsizable open boat
which is, with an irony rare even in literature, a favorite image of
Shelley. Moby Dick returns us to a more traditional form of the
leviathan. The destroyer which appears at the end of H. G. Wells's
Tono-Bungay is notable as coming from a low mimetic writer not
much given to introducing hieratic symbols. Fire symbolism is often
ironic and destructive, as in the fire which ends the action of The
Spoils of Boynton, In the industrial age, however, Prometheus, who
stole fire for man's use, is one of the favorite, if not the actual fa-
vorite, mythological figure among poets.
The relation of innocence and experience to apocalyptic and
demonic imagery illustrates an aspect of displacement which we
have so far said little about; displacement in the direction of the
moral The two dialectical structures are, radically, the desirable and
the undesirable. Racks and dungeons belong in the sinister vision
not because they are morally forbidden but because it is imp<^T>le
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
to make them objects of desire. Sexual fulfilment, on the other
hand, may be desired even if it is morally condemned. Civilization
tends to try to make the desirable and the moral coincide. The stu-
dent of comparative mythology occasionally turns up, in a primitive
or ancient cult, a bit of uninhibited mythopoeia that makes him real-
ize how completely all the higher religions have limited their apoca-
lyptic visions to morally acceptable ones. A good deal of expurga-
tion clearly lies behind the development of Jewish, Greek, and other
mythologies; or, as Victorian students of myth used to say, a repul-
sive and grotesque barbarism has been purified by a growing ethical
refinement. Egyptian mythology begins with a god who creates the
world by masturbation— a logical enough way of symbolizing the
process of creation de Deo, but not one that we should expect to
find in Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament. As long as
poetry follows religion towards the moral, religious and poetic arche-
types will be very close together, as they are in Dante. Under such
influence apocalyptic sexual imagery, for instance, tends to become
matrimonial or virginal; the incestuous, the homosexual, and the
adulterous go on the demonic side. The quality in art that Aristotle
called spoudaios and that Matthew Arnold translated as ''high seri-
ousness'" results from this rapprochement of religion and poetry
within a common moral framework.
But poetry continually tends to right its own balance, to return
to the pattern of desire and away from the conventional and moral.
It usually does this in satire, the genre which is furthest removed
from "high seriousness,"' but not always. The moral and the de-
sirable have many important and significant connections, but still
morality, which comes to terms with experience and necessity, is
one thing, and desire, which tries to escape from necessity, is quite
another. Thus literature is as a rule less inflexible than moraliU',
and it owes much of its status as a liberal art to that fact. The quali-
ties that morality and religion usually call ribald, obscene, sub-
versive, lewd, and blasphemous have an essential place in literature,
but often they can achieve expression only through ingenious tech-
niques of displacement.
The simplest of such techniques is the phenomenon that we may
call "demonic modulation," or the deliberate reversal of the cus-
tomary moral associations of archetypes. Any symbol at all takes
its meaning primarily from its context: a dragon may be sinister in
a medieval romance or friendly in a Chinese one; an island may be
156
THEORY OF MYTHS
Prosperous island or Circe's. But because of the large amount of
learned and traditional symbolism in literature, certain secondary
associations become habitual. The serpent, because of its role in
the garden of Eden story, usually belongs on the sinister side of our
catalogue in Western literature; the revolutionary sympathies of
Shelley impel him to use an innocent serpent in The Revolt of
Islam. Or a free and equal society may be symbolized by a band
of robbers, pirates, or gypsies; or true love may be symbolized by
the triumph of an adulterous liaison over marriage, as in most tri-
angle comedy; by a homosexual passion (if it is true love that is
celebrated in Virgil's second eclogue) or an incestuous one, as in
many Romantics. In the nineteenth century, with demonic myth
approaching, this kind of reversed symbolism is organized into all
the patterns of the ''Romantic agony," chiefly sadism. Promethean-
ism, and diabolism, which in some of the “decadents" seem to
provide all the disadvantages of superstition with none of the ad-
vantages of religion. Diabolism is not however invariably a sophis-
ticated development: Huckleberry Finn, for example, wins our S}'m-
pathy and admiration by preferring hell with his hunted friend
to the heaven of the white slave-owners' god. On the other hand,
imagery traditionally demonic may be used for the starting-point
of a movement of redemption, like the City of Destruction in The
Pilgrim's Progress. Alchemical symbolism takes the ouroboros and
the hermaphrodite {res bina), as well as the traditional romantic
dragon, in this redemptive context.
Apocalyptic symbolism presents the infinitely desirable, in which
the lusts and ambitions of man are identified with, adapted to, or
projected on the gods. The art of the analogy of innocence, which
includes most of the comic (in its happy-ending aspect), the idyl-
lic, the romantic, the reverent, the panegyrical, the idealized, and
the magical, is largely concerned with an attempt to present the
desirable in human, familiar, attainable, and morally allowable
terms. Much the same is true of the relation of the demonic world
to the analogy of experience. Tragedy, for instance, is a vision of
what does happen and must be accepted. To this extent it is a
moral and plausible displacement of the bitter resentments that
humanity feels against all obstacles to its desires. However malig-
nant we may feel Athene to be in Sophocles' Afax, the tragedy
clearly implies that we must come to terms with her possession of
power, even in our thoughts. A Christian who believed the Greek
^57
THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
gods to be nothing but devils would, if he were criticizing a tragedy
of Sophocles, make an undisplaced or demonic interpretation of it
Such an interpretation would bring out everything that Sophocles
was trying not to say; but it could be a shrewd criticism of its latent
or underlying demonic structure for all that. The same kind of
interpretation would be equally possible for many passages of Chris-
tian poetry dealing with the just wrath of God, the demonic con-
tent of which is often a hated father-figure. In pointing out the
latent apocalyptic or demonic patterns in a literary work, we should
not make the error of assuming that this latent content is the real
content hypocritically disguised by a lying censor. It is simply one
factor which is relevant to a full critical analysis. It is often, how-
ever, the factor which lifts a work of literature out of the category
of the merely historical.
THEORY OF MYTHOS: INTRODUCTION
The meaning of a poem, its structure of imagery, is a static pat-
tern. The five structures of meaning we have given are, to use an-
other musical analogy, the keys in which they are written and finally
resolve; but narrative involves movement from one structure to
another. The main area of such movement obviously has to be the
three intermediate fields. The apocalyptic and demonic worlds, be-
ing structures of pure metaphorical identity, suggest the eternally
unchanging, and lend themselves very readily to being projected
existentially as heaven and hell, where there is continuous life but
no process of life. The analogies of innocence and experience rep-
resent the adaptation of myth to nature: they give us, not the city
and the garden at the final goal of human vision, but the process
of building and planting. The fundamental form of process is cycli-
cal movement, the alternation of success and decline, effort and
repose, life and death which is the rhythm of process. Hence our
seven categories of images may also be seen as different forms of
rotary or cyclical movement. Thus:
1. In the divine world the central process or movement is that of
the death and rebirth, or the disappearance and return, or the in-
carnation and withdrawal, of a god. This divine activity is usually
identified or associated with one or more of the cyclical processes
of nature. The god may be a sun-god, dying at night and reborn at
dawn, or else with an annual rebirth at the winter solstice; or he
15S
THEORY OF MYTHS
may be a god of vegetation, dying in autumn and reviving in spring,
or (as in the birth stories of the Buddha) he may be an incarnate
god going through a series of human or animal life-cycles. As a god
is almost by definition immortal, it is a regular feature of all such
myths that the dying god is reborn as the same person. Hence the
mythical or abstract structural principle of the cycle is that the
continuum of identity in the individual life from birth to death is
extended from death to rebirth. To this pattern of identical recur-
rence, the death and revival of the same individual, all other cyclical
patterns are as a rule assimilated. The assimilation can be of course
much closer in Eastern culture, where the doctrine of reincarnation
is generally accepted, than in the West.
2. The fire-world of heavenly bodies presents us with three im-
portant cyclical rhythms. Most obvious is the daily journey of the
sun-god across the sky, often thought of as guiding a boat or chariot,
followed by a mysterious passage through a dark underworld, some-
times conceived as the belly of a devouring monster, back to the
starting point. The solstitial cycle of the solar year supplies an ex-
tension of the same symbolism, incorporated in our Christmas lit-
erature. Here there is more emphasis on the theme of a newborn
light threatened by the powers of darkness. The lunar cycle has
been on the whole of less importance to Western poetry in historic
times, whatever its prehistoric role. But its crucial sequence of old
moon, 'finterlunar cave,” and new moon may be the source, as it is
clearly a close analogy, of the three-day rhythm of death, disap-
pearance, and resurrection which we have in our Easter symbolism.
3. The human world is midway between the spiritual and the
animal, and reflects that duality in its cyclical rhythms. Closely
parallel to the solar cycle of light and darkness is the imaginative
cycle of waking and of dreaming life. This cycle underlies the an-
tithesis of the imagination of experience and of innocence already
dealt with. For the human rhythm is the opposite of the solar
one: a titanic libido wakes when the sun sleeps, and the light of day
is often the darkness Of desire. Then again, in common with ani-
mals, man exhibits the ordinary cycle of life ^nd death, in which
there is generic but not individual rebirth,
4. It is rare, in literature as in life, to find even a domesticated
animal peacefully living through its full span of life to reach a final
nunc dimittis. The exceptions, such as Odysseus' dog, are appropri-
ate to the theme of nostm or full clo^ of a cyclical movement. Ani-
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
mal lives, and human lives similarly subject to the order of nature,
suggest more frequently the tragic process of life cut off violently
by accident, sacrifice, ferocity, or some overriding need, the continu-
ity Avhich flows on after the tragic act being something other than
the life itself.
5. The vegetable world supplies us of course with the annual cycle
of seasons, often identified with or represented by a divine figure
which dies in the autumn or is killed with the gathering of the
harvest and the vintage, disappears in winter, and revives in spring.
The divine figure may be male (Adonis) or female (Proserpine),
but the symbolic structures resulting differ somewhat.
6. Poets, like critics, have generally been Spenglerians, in the
sense that in poetr)', as in Spengler, civilized life is frequently as-
similated to the organic cycle of growth, maturity, decline, death,
and rebirth in another individual form. Themes of a golden or
heroic age in the past, of a millennium in the future, of the wheel
of fortune in social affairs, of the ubi sunt elegy, of meditations over
ruins, of nostalgia for a lost pastoral simplicity, of regret or exulta-
tion over the collapse of an empire, belong here.
7. Water-symbolism has also its own cycle, from rains to springs,
from springs and fountains to brooks and rivers, from rivers to the
sea or the winter snow, and back again.
These cyclical symbols are usually divided into four main phases,
the four seasons of the year being the type for four periods of the
day (morning, noon, evening, night), four aspects of the water-cy-
cle (rain, fountains, rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth,
maturity, age, death), and the like. We find a great number of
symbols from phases one and two in Keats's Endymion, and of
symbols from phases three and four in The Waste Land (where
we have to add four stages of Western culture, medieval. Renais-
sance, eighteenth-century, and contemporary). We may note that
there is no cycle of air: the wind bloweth where it listeth, and
images dealing with the movement of ''spirit" are likely to be as-
sociated with the theme of unpredictability t>i sudden crisis.
In studying poems of immense scope, such as the Commedia or
Paradise Lost, we find that we have to learn a good deal of cos-
mology. This cosmology is presented, quite correctly of course, as
the science of its day, a schematism of correspondences which, after
supplying us with a not too eflScient calendar and a few words like
160
THEORY OF MYTHS
“phlegmatic'^ and “jovial/' became defunct as science. There are
also other poems incorporating equally obsolete science, such as
The Purple Island, The Loves of the Plants, The Art of Preserv-
ing Health, which survive chiefly as curiosities. A literary critic
should not overlook the compliment to poetry implied by the
existence of such poems, but still versified science, as such, keeps
the descriptive structure of science, and so imposes a non-poetic
form on poetry. To make it successful as poetry a great deal of
tact is required, yet those most attracted to such themes are very
apt to be tactless poets. Dante and Milton were certainly better
poets than Darwin or Fletcher: perhaps, however, it would be more
fruitful to say that it was their finer instincts and judgements that
led them to cosmological, as distinct from scientific or descriptive,
themes.
For the form of cosmology is clearly much closer to that of po-
etry, and the thought suggests itself that symmetrical cosmology
may be a branch of myth. If so, then it would be, like myth, a struc-
tural principle of poetry, whereas in science itself, symmetrical
cosmology is exactly what Bacon said it was, an idol of the theatre.
Perhaps, then, this whole pseudo-scientific world of three spirits,
four humors, five elements, seven planets, nine spheres, twelve
zodiacal signs, and so on, belongs in fact, as it does in practice,
to the grammar of literary imagery. It has long been noticed that
the Ptolemaic universe provides a better framework of symbolism,
with all the identities, associations, and correspondences that sym-
bolism demands, than the Copemican one does. Perhaps it not
only provides a framework of poetic symbols but is one, or at any
rate becomes one after it loses its validity as science, just as Clas-
sical mythology became purely poetic after its oracles had ceased.
The same principle would account for the attraction of poets in
the last century or two to occult systems of correspondences, and
to such constructs as Yeats's Vision and Poe's Eureka,
The conception of a heaven above, a hell beneath, and a cyclical
cosmos or order of nature in between forms the ground plan, mu-
tatis mutandis, of both Dante and Milton. The same plan is in
paintings of the Last Judgement, where there is a rotary movement
of the saved rising on the right and the damned falling on the left.
We may apply this construct to our principle that there are two
fundamental movemente of narrative: a cyclical movement within
the order of nature, and a diakctical movement from that orcte
i6i
THIRD essay: archetypal criticism
into the apocalyptic world above. (The movement to the demonic
world below is very rare, because a constant rotation within the
order of nature is demonic in itself.)
The top half of the natural cycle is the world of romance and the
analogy of innocence; the lower half is the world of '"realism"' and
the analogy of experience. There are thus four main types of mythi-
cal movement: within romance, within experience, down, and up.
The downward movement is the tragic movement, the wheel of
fortune falling from innocence toward hamartia, and from hamar-
tia to catastrophe. The upward movement is the comic movement,
from threatening complications to a happy ending and a general
assumption of post-dated innocence in which everyone lives hap-
pily ever after. In Dante the upward movement is through purga-
tory.
We have thus answered the question: are there narrative cate-
gories of literature broader than, or logically prior to, the ordinary
literary genres? There are four such categories: the romantic, the
tragic, the comic, and the ironic or satiric. We get the same answer
by inspection if we look at the ordinary meanings of these terms.
Tragedy and comedy may have been originally names for two
species of drama, but we also employ the terms to describe general
characteristics of literary fictions, without regard to genre. It would
be silly to insist that comedy can refer only to a certain type of
stage play, and must never be employed in connection with Chau-
cer or Jane Austen. Chaucer himself would certainly have defined
comedy, as his monk defines tragedy, much more broadly than that.
If we are told that what we are about to read is tragic or comic, we
expect a certain kind of structure and mood, but not necessarily
a certain genre. The same is true of the word romance, and also of
the words irony and satire, which are, as generally employed, ele-
ments of the literature of experience, and which we shall here
adopt in place of "realism." We thus have four narrative pregeneric
elements of literature which I shall call mythoi or generic plots.
If we think of our experience of these mythoi, we shall realize
that they form two opposed pairs. Tragedy and comedy contrast
rather than blend, and so do romance and irony, the champions
respectively of the ideal and the actual. On the other hand, comedy
blends insensibly into satire at one extreme and into romance at
the other; romance may be comic or tragic; tragic extends from
high romance to bitter and ironic realism.
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THEORY OF MYTHS
THE MYTHOS OF SPRING: COMEDY
Dramatic comedy, from which fictional comedy is mainly de-
scended, has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles
and character types. Bernard Shaw remarked that a comic drama-
tist could get a reputation for daring originality by stealing his
method from Molifere and his characters from Dickens: if we were
to read Menander and Aristophanes for Moliere and Dickens the
statement would be hardly less true, at least as a general principle.
The earliest extant European comedy, Aristophanes' The Achat'
nians, contains the miles gloriosus or military braggart who is still
going strong in Chaplin's Great Dictator; the Joxer Daly of O'Ca-
sey's Juno and the Paycock has the same character and dramatic
function as the parasites of twenty-five hundred years ago, and the
audiences of vaudeville, comic strips, and television programs still
laugh at the jokes that were declared to be outworn at the opening
of The Frogs.
The plot structure of Greek New Comedy, as transmitted by
Plautus and Terence, in itself less a form than a formula, has be-
come the basis for most comedy, especially in its more highly con-
ventionalized dramatic form, down to our own day. It will be most
convenient to work out the theory of comic construction from
drama, using illustrations from fiction only incidentally. What nor-
mally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his
desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near
the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have
his will. In this simple pattern there are several complex elements.
In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement
from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play
the obstructing characters are in charge of the play's society, and
the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the
play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together
causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the mo-
ment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in
the action, the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognitio.
The appearance of this new society is frequently signalized by
some kind of party or festive ritual, which either appears at the end
of the play or is assumed to take place immediately afterward. Wed-
dings are most common, and sometimes so many of them occur, as
in the quadruple wedding at the end of As You JJke It, that they
163
THIRD ESSAY; ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
suggest also the wholesale pairing off that takes place in a dance,
which is another common conclusion, and the normal one for the
masque. The banquet at the end of The Taming of the Shrew has
an ancestry that goes back to Greek Middle Comedy; in Plautus
the audience is sometimes jocosely invited to an imaginary banquet
afterwards; Old Comedy, like the modern Christmas pantomime,
was more generous, and occasionally threw bits of food to the au-
dience. As the final society reached by comedy is the one that the
audience has recognized all along to be the proper and desirable
state of affairs, an act of communion with the audience is in order.
Tragic actors expect to be applauded as well as comic ones, but
nevertheless the word *'plaudite” at the end of a Roman comedy,
the invitation to the audience to form part of the comic society,
would seem rather out of place at the end of a tragedy. The resolu-
tion of comedy comes, so to speak, from the audience's side of the
stage; in a tragedy it comes from some mysterious world on the
opposite side. In the movie, where darkness permits a more eroti-
cally oriented audience, the plot usually moves toward an act
which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is
symbolized by a closing embrace.
The obstacles to the hero's desire, then, form the action of the
comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution. The
obstacles are usually parental, hence comedy often turns on a clash
between a son's and a father's will. Thus the comic dramatist as
a rule writes for the younger men in his audience, and the older
members of almost any society are apt to feel that comedy has
something subversive about it. This is certainly one element in the
social persecution of drama, which is not peculiar to Puritans or
even Christians, as Terence in pagan Rome met much the same
kind of social opposition that Ben Jonson did. There is one scene
in Plautus where a son and father are making love to the same
courtesan, and the son asks his father pointedly if he really does
love mother. One has to see this scene against the background of
Roman family life to understand its importance as psychological
release. Even in Shakespeare there are startling outbreaks of baiting
older men, and in contemporary movies the triumph of youth is
so relentless that the moviemakers find some difficulty in getting
anyone over the age of seventeen into their audiences.
The opponent to the hero's wishes, when not the father, is gen-
erally someone who partakes of the father's closer relation to e$-
164
THEORY OF MYTHS
tablished society: that is, a rival with less youth and more money.
In Plautus and Terence he is usually either the pimp who owns the
girl, or a wandering soldier with a supply of ready cash. The fury
with which these characters are baited and exploded from the stage
shows that they are father-surrogates, and even if they were not,
they would still be usurpers, and their claim to possess the girl
must be shown up as somehow fraudulent. They are, in short, im-
postors, and the extent to which they have real power implies some
criticism of the society that allows them their power. In Plautus
and Terence this criticism seldom goes beyond the immorality of
brothels and professional harlots, but in Renaissance dramatists,
including Jonson, there is some sharp observation of the rising
power of money and the sort of ruling class it is building up.
The tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible
in its final society: the blocking characters are more often recon-
ciled or converted than simply repudiated. Comedy often includes
a scapegoat ritual of expulsion which gets rid of some ineconcilable
character, but exposure and disgrace make for pathos, or even
tragedy. The Merchant of Venice seems almost an experiment in
coming as close as possible to upsetting the comic balance. If the
dramatic role of Shylock is ever so slightly exaggerated, as it gen-
erally is -when the leading actor of the company takes the part, it
is upset, and the play becomes the tragedy of the Jew of Venice
with a comic epilogue. Volpone ends with a great bustle of sen-
tences to penal servitude and the galleys, and one feels that the de-
liverance of society hardly needs so much hard labor; but then
Volpone is exceptional in being a kind of comic imitation of a
tragedy, with the point of Volpone's hybris carefully marked.
The principle of conversion becomes clearer with characters
whose chief function is the amusing of the audience. The original
miles gloriosus in Plautus is a son of Jove and Venus who has killed
an elephant with his fist and seven thousand men in one day's
fighting. In other words, he is trying to put on a good show: the
exuberance of his boasting helps to put the play over. The con-
vention says that the braggart must be exposed, ridiculed, swindled,
and beaten. But why should a professional dramatist, of all people,
want so to harry a character who is putting on a good show— his
show at that? When we find Falstaff invited to the final feast in
The Merry Wives, Caliban reprieved, attempts made to mollify
Malvolio, and Angelo and Parolles allowed to live down their dis-
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
grace, we are seeing a fundamental principle of comedy at work.
The tendency of the comic society to include rather than exclude
is the reason for the traditional importance of the parasite, who has
no business to be at the final festival but is nevertheless there. The
word “gr^ce/' with all its Renaissance overtones from the graceful
courtier of Castiglione to the gracious God of Christianity, is a most
important thematic word in Shakespearean comedy.
The action of comedy in moving from one social center to an-
other is not unlike the action of a lawsuit, in which plaintiff and
defendant construct different versions of the same situation, one
finally being judged as real and the other as illusory. This resem-
blance of the rhetoric of comedy to the rhetoric of jurisprudence
has been recognized from earliest times. A little pamphlet called
the Tractatus Coislinianus, closely related to Aristotle’s Poetics,
which sets down all the essential facts about comedy in about a
page and a half, divides the dianoia of comedy into two parts,
opinion {pistis) and proof (gnosis). These correspond roughly to
the usurping and the desirable societies respectively. Proofs (i.e.,
the means of bringing about the happier society) are subdivided
into oaths, compacts, witnesses, ordeals (or tortures), and laws—
in other words the five forms of material proof in law cases listed
in the Rhetoric. We notice how often the action of a Shakespearean
comedy begins with some absurd, cruel, or irrational law: the law
of killing Syracusans in the Comedy of Errors, the law of compul-
sory marriage in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, the law that con-
firms Shylock’s bond, the attempts of Angelo to legislate people
into righteousness, and the like, which the action of the comedy
then evades or breaks. Compacts are as a rule the conspiracies
formed by the hero’s society; witnesses, such as overhearers of con-
versations or people with special knowledge (like the hero’s old
nurse with her retentive memory for birthmarks), are the com-
monest devices for bringing about the comic discovery. Ordeals
(basanoi) are usually tests or touchstones of the hero’s character:
the Greek word also means touchstones, and seems to be echoed
in Shakespeare’s Bassanio whose ordeal it is to make a judgement
on the worth of metals.
There are two ways of developing the form of comedy: one is to
throw the main emphasis on the blocking characters; the other is
to throw it forward on the scenes of discovery and reconciliation.
One is the general tendency of comic irony, satire, realism, and
1 66
THEORY OF MYTHS
studies of manners; the other is the tendency of Shakespearean
and other types of romantic comedy. In the comedy of manners
the main ethical interest falls as a rule on the blocking characters.
The technical hero and heroine are not often very interesting peo-
ple: the adulescentes of Plautus and Terence are all alike, as hard
to tell apart in the dark as Demetrius and Lysander, who may be
parodies of them. Generally the hero's character has the neutrality
that enables him to represent a wish-fulfilment. It is very different
with the miserly or ferocious parent, the boastful or foppish rival,
or the other characters who stand in the way of the action. In Mo-
licre we have a simple but fully tested formula in which the ethical
interest is focussed on a single blocking character, a heavy father,
a miser, a misanthrope, a hypocrite, or a hypochondriac. Tliese are
the figures that we remember, and the plays are usually named after
them, but we can seldom remember all the Valentins and An-
geliques who wriggle out of their clutches. In The Merry Wives
the technical hero, a man named Fenton, has only a bit part, and
this play has picked up a hint or two from Plautus's Casina, where
the hero and heroine are not even brought on the stage at all. Fic-
tional comedy, especially Dickens, often follows the same practice
of grouping its interesting characters around a somewhat dullish
pair of technical leads. Even Tom Jones, though far more fully
realized, is still deliberately associated, as his commonplace name
indicates, with the conventional and typical.
Comedy usually moves toward a happy ending, and the normal
response of the audience to a happy ending is '‘this should be,"
which sounds like a moral judgement. So it is, except that it is not
moral in the restricted sense, but social. Its opposite is not the vil-
lainous but the absurd, and comedy finds the virtues of Malvolio
as absurd as the vices of Angelo. Moli^re's misanthrope, being com-
mitted to sincerity, which is a virtue, is morally in a strong posi-
tion, but the audience soon realizes that his friend Philinte, who
is ready to lie quite cheerfully in order to enable other people to
preserve their self-respect, is the more genuinely sincere of the two.
It is of course quite possible to have a moral comedy, but the re-
sult is often the kind of melodrama that we have described as com-
edy without humor, and which achieves its happy ending with a
self-righteous tone that most comedy avoids. It is hardly possible
to imagine a drama without conflict, and it is hardly possible to
imagine a conflict without some kind of enmity. But just as love,
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
including sexual love, is a very different thing from lust, so enmity
is a very different thing from hatred. In tragedy, of course, enmity
almost always includes hatred; comedy is different, and one feels
that the social judgement against the absurd is closer to the comic
norm than the moral judgement against the wicked.
The question then arises of what makes the blocking character
absurd. Ben Jonson explained this by his theory of the ''humor,''
the character dominated by what Pope calls a ruling passion. The
humor's dramatic function is to express a state of what might be
called ritual bondage. He is obsessed by his humor, and his func-
tion in the play is primarily to repeat his obsession. A sick man is
not a humor, but a hypochondriac is, because, qua hypochondriac,
he can never admit to good health, and can never do anything in-
consistent with the role that he has prescribed for himself. A miser
can do and say nothing that is not connected with the hiding of
gold or saving of money. In The Silent Woman, Jonson's nearest
approach to Mobile's type of construction, the whole action re-
cedes from the humor of Morose, whose determination to eliminate
noise from his life produces so loquacious a comic action.
The principle of the humor is the principle that unincremental
repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny. In a
tragedy— Oedipus Tyrannus is the stock example— repetition leads
logically to catastrophe. Repetition overdone or not going anywhere
belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other
reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern. In
Synge's Riders to the Sea a mother, after losing her husband and
five sons at sea, finally loses her last son, and the result is a very
beautiful and moving play. But if it had been a full-length tragedy
plodding glumly through the seven drownings one after another,
the audience would have been helpless with unsympathetic laughter
long before it was over. The principle of repetition as the basis of
humor both in Jonson's sense and in ours is well known to the crea-
tors of comic strips, in which a character is established as a parasite,
a glutton (often confined to one dish), or a shrew, and who begins
to be funny after the point has been made every day for several
months. Continuous comic radio programs, too, are much more
amusing to habitues than to neophytes. The girth of Falstaff and
the hallucinations of Quixote are based on much the same comic
laws. Mr. E. M. Forster speaks with disdain of Dickens's Mrs.
Micawber, who never says anything except that she will never de-
168
THEORY OF MYTHS
sert Mr. Micawber: a strong contrast is marked here between the
refined writer too finicky for popular formulas, and the major one
who exploits them ruthlessly.
The humor in comedy is usually someone with a good deal of
social prestige and power, who is able to force much of the play's
society into line with his obsession. Thus the humor is intimately
connected with the theme of the absurd or irrational law that the
action of comedy moves toward breaking. It is significant that the
central character of our earliest humor comedy, The Wasps^ is ob-
sessed by law cases: Shylock, too, unites a craving for the law with
the humor of revenge. Often the absurd law appears as a whim of
a bemused tyrant whose will is law, like Leontes or the humorous
Duke Frederick in Shakespeare, who makes some arbitrary decision
or rash promise: here law is replaced by '*oath," also mentioned in
the Tractatus, Or it may take the form of a sham Utopia, a society
of ritual bondage constructed by an act of humorous or pedantic
will, like the academic retreat in Love's Labors Lost This theme is
also as old as Aristophanes, whose parodies of Platonic social
schemes in The Birds and Ecclesiazusae deal with it.
The society emerging at the conclusion of comedy represents, by
contrast, a kind of moral norm, or pragmatically free society. Its
ideals are seldom defined or formulated: definition and formulation
belong to the humors, who want predictable activity. We are sim-
ply given to understand that the newly-manied couple will live
happily ever after, or that at any rate they will get along in a rela-
tively unhumorous and clear-sighted manner. That is one reason
why the character of the successful hero is so often left undevel-
oped: his real life begins at the end of the play, and we have to
believe him to be potentially a more interesting character than he
appears to be. In Terence's Adelphoi, Demea, a harsh father, is
contrasted with his brother Micio, who is indulgent. Micio being
more liberal, he leads the way to the comic resolution, and converts
Demea, but then Demea points out the indolence inspiring a good
deal of Micio's liberality, and releases him from a complementary
humorous bondage.
Thus the movement from pistis to gnosis^ from a society con-
trolled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the older char-
acten to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom is
fundamentally, as the Greek words surest, a movement from fflu-
sion to reality. Illusicm k whatever is fixed or definable, and reality
THIRD ESSAY; ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
is best understood as its negation: whatever reality is, it's not that
Hence the importance of the theme of creating and dispelling il-
lusion in comedy: the illusions caused by disguise, obsession, hy-
pocrisy, or unknown parentage.
The comic ending is generally manipulated by a twist in the plot.
In Roman comedy the heroine, who is usually a slave or courtesan,
turns out to be the daughter of somebody respectable, so that the
hero can marry her without loss of face. The cognitio in comedy,
in which the characters find out who their relatives are, and who is
left of the opposite sex not a relative, and hence available for mar-
riage, is one of the features of comedy that have never changed
much: The Confidential Clerk indicates that it still holds the atten-
tion of dramatists. There is a brilliant parody of a cognitio at the
end of Major Barbara (the fact that the hero of this play is a pro-
fessor of Greek perhaps indicates an unusual affinity to the con-
ventions of Euripides and Menander), where Undershaft is en-
abled to break the rule that he cannot appoint his son-in-law as
successor by the fact that the son-in-law's own father married his
deceased wife's sister in Australia, so that the son-in-law is his own
first cousin as well as himself. It sounds complicated, but the plots
of comedy often are complicated because there is something inher-
ently absurd about complications. As the main character interest in
comedy is so often focussed on the defeated characters, comedy
regularly illustrates a victory of arbitrary plot over consistency of
character. Thus, in striking contrast to tragedy, there can hardly be
such a thing as inevitable comedy, as far as the action of the indi-
vidual play is concerned. That is, we may know that the convention
of comedy will make some kind of happy ending inevitable, but
still for each play the dramatist must produce a distinctive “gim-
mick" or “weenie," to use two disrespectful Hollywood synonyms
for anagnorisis. Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as
desirable, and they are brought about by manipulation. The watcher
of death and tragedy has nothing to do but sit and wait for the in-
evitable end; but something gets bom at the end of comedy, and the
watcher of birth is a member of a busy society.
The manipulation of plot does not always involve metamor-
phosis of character, but there is no violation of comic decorum
when it does. Unlikely conversions, miraculous transformations,
and providential assistance are inseparable from comedy. Further,
whatever emerges is supposed to be there for good: if the cur-
THEORY OF MYTHS
mudgeon becomes lovable, we understand that he will not im-
mediately relapse again into his ritual habit. Civilizations which
stress the desirable rather than the real, and the religious as op-
posed to the scientific perspective, think of drama almost entirely
in terms of comedy. In the classical drama of India, we are told,
the tragic ending was regarded as bad taste, much as the manipu-
lated endings of comedy are regarded as bad taste by novelists in-
terested in ironic realism.
The total mythos of comedy, only a small part of which is ordi-
narily presented, has regularly what in music is called a ternary
form: the hero's society rebels against the society of the senex and
triumphs, but the hero's society is a Saturnalia, a reversal of social
standards which recalls a golden age in the past before the main
action of the play begins. Tlius we have a stable and harmonious
order disrupted by folly, obsession, forgetfulness, “pride and prej-
udice," or events not understood by the characters themselves, and
then restored. Often there is a benevolent grandfather, so to speak,
who overrules the action set up by the blocking humor and so
links the first and third parts. An example is Mr. Burchell, the
disguised uncle of the wicked squire, in The Vicar of Wakefield, A
very long play, such as the Indian Sakuntala, may present all three
phases; a very intricate one, such as many of Menander's evidently
were, may indicate their outlines. But of course very often the first
phase is not given at all: the audience simply understands an ideal
state of affairs which it knows to be better than what is revealed
in the play, and which it recognizes as like that to which the action
leads. This ternary action is, ritually, like a contest of summer and
winter in which winter occupies the middle action; psychologically,
it is like the removal of a neurosis or blocking point and the restor-
ing of an unbroken current of energy^ and memory. The Jonsonian
masque, with the antimasque in the middle, gives a highly conven-
tionalized or “abstract" version of it.
We pass now to the typical characters of comedy. In drama,
characterization depends on function; what a character is follows
from what he has to do in the play. Dramatic function in its turn
depends on the structure of the play; the character has certain
things to do because the play has such and such a shape. The struc-
ture of the play in its turn depends on the cat^ory of the play;
if it is a comedy, its structure will require a comic resolution and a
THIRD essay: archetypal criticism
prevailing comic mood. Hence when we speak of typical characters,
we are not trying to reduce lifelike characters to stock types, though
we certainly are suggesting that the sentimental notion of an antith-
esis between the lifelike character and the stock type is a vulgar
error. All lifelike characters, whether in drama or fiction, owe their
consistency to the appropriateness of the stock type which belongs
to their dramatic function. That stock type is not the character
but it is as necessary to the character as a skeleton is to the actor
who plays it.
With regard to the characterization of comedy, the Tractatus
lists three types of comic characters: the alazons or impostors, the
eirons or self-deprecators, and the buffoons [bomolochoi] . This
list is closely related to a passage in the Ethics which contrasts the
first two, and then goes on to contrast the buffoon with a character
whom Aristotle calls agroikos or churlish, literally rustic. We may
reasonably accept the churl as a fourth character type, and so we
have two opposed pairs. The contest of eiron and dazon forms the
basis of the comic action, and the buffoon and the churl polarize
the comic mood.
We have previously dealt with the terms eiron and dazon. The
humorous blocking characters of comedy are nearly always impos-
tors, though it is more frequently a lack of self-knowledge than
simple hypocrisy that characterizes them. The multitudes of comic
scenes in which one character complacently soliloquizes while an-
other makes sarcastic asides to the audience show the contest of
eiron and dazon in its purest form, and show too that the audience
is sympathetic to the eiron side. Central to the dazon group is the
senex iratus or heavy father, who with his rages and threats, his
obsessions and his gullibility, seems closely related to some of the
demonic characters of romance, such as Polyphemus. Occasionally
a character may have the dramatic function of such a figure with-
out his characteristics: an example is Squire All worthy in Tom
Jones, who as far as the plot is concerned behaves almost as stupidly
as Squire Western. Of heavy-father surrogates, the miles gloriosm
has been mentioned: his popularity is largely due to the fact that
he is a man of words rather than deeds, and is consequently far
more useful to a practising dramatist than any tight-lipped hero
could ever be. The pedant, in Renaissance comedy often a student
of the occult sciences, the fop or coxcomb, and similar humors,
require no comment. The female dxixon is rare: Katharina the
172
THEORY OF MYTHS
shrew represents to some extent a female miles gloriosus, and the
pr6cieuse ridicule a female pedant, but the “menace'* or siren who
gets in the way of the true heroine is more often found as a sinister
figure of melodrama or romance than as a ridiculous figure in com-
edy.
The eiron figures need a little more attention. Central to this
group is the hero, who is an eiron figure because, as explained, the
dramatist tends to play him down and make him rather neutral
and unformed in character. Next in importance is the heroine, also
often played down: in Old Comedy, when a girl accompanies a
male hero in his triumph, she is generally a stage prop, a muta per-
sona not previously introduced. A more difficult form of cognitio
is achieved when the heroine disguises herself or through some
other device brings about the comic resolution, so that the person
whom the hero is seeking turns out to be the person who has
sought him. The fondness of Shakespeare for this “she stoops to
conquer” theme needs only to be mentioned here, as it belongs
more naturally to the mythos of romance.
Another central eiron figure is the type entrusted with hatching
the schemes which bring about the hero's victory. This character in
Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave {dolosus servus),
and in Renaissance comedy he becomes the scheming valet who is
so frequent in Continental plays, and in Spanish drama is called
the gracioso. Modern audiences are most familiar with him in Figaro
and in the Leporello of Don Giovanni. Through such intermediate
nineteenth-century figures as Micawber and the Touchwood of
Scott's St. Ronans Wc2/, who, like the gracioso, have buffoon affilia-
tions, he evolves into the amateur detective of modem fiction. The
Jeeves of P. G. Wodehouse is a more direct descendant. Female
confidantes of the same general family are often brought in to oil
the machinery of the well-made play. Elizabethan comedy had
another type of trickster, represented by the Matthew Merrygreek
of Ralph Roister Doister, who is generally said to be developed
from the vice or iniquity of the morality plays: as usual, the analogy
is sound enough, whatever historians decide about origins. The
vice, to give him that name, is very useful to a comic dramatist
because he acts from pure love of mischief, and can set a comic
action going with the minimum of motivation. The vice may be as
light-hearted as Puck or as malignant as Don John in Muck Ado,
but as a rule the vice's activity is, in spite of his name, benevolent
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
One of the tricky slaves in Plautus, in a soliloquy, boasts that he
is the architectus of the comic action: such a character carries out
the will of the author to reach a happy ending. He is in fact the
spirit of comedy, and the two clearest examples of the type in
Shakespeare, Puck and Ariel, are both spiritual beings. The tricky
slave often has his own freedom in mind as the reward of his exer-
tions: Ariel's longing for release is in the same tradition.
Tlie role of the vice includes a great deal of disguising, and the
type may often be recognized by disguise. A good example is the
Brainworm of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, who calls the
action of the play the day of his metamorphoses. Similarly Ariel
has to surmount the difficult stage direction of “Enter invisible.’'
The vice is combined with the hero whenever the latter is a cheeky,
improvident young man who hatches his own schemes and cheats
his rich father or uncle into giving him his patrimony along with
the girl.
Another eiron type has not been much noticed. This is a char-
acter, generally an older man, who begins the action of the play
by withdrawing from it, and ends the play by returning. He is often
a father with the motive of seeing what his son will do. The action
of Every Man in His Humour is set going in this way by Knowell
Senior. Tlie disappearance and return of Lovewit, the owner of the
house which is the scene of The Alchemist, has the same dramatic
function, though the characterization is different. The clearest
Shakespearean example is the Duke in Measure for Measure, but
Shakespeare is more addicted to the type than might appear at
first glance. In Shakespeare the vice is rarely the real architectus:
Puck and Ariel both act under orders from an older man, if one may
call Oberon a man for the moment. In The Tempest Shakespeare
returns to a comic action established by Aristophanes, in which an
older man, instead of retiring from the action, builds it up on the
stage. When the heroine takes the vice role in Shakespeare, she is
often significantly related to her father, even when the father is not
in the play at all, like the father of Helena, who gives her his medi-
cal knowledge, or the father of Portia, who arranges the scheme of
the caskets. A more conventionally treated example of the same
benevolent Prospero figure turned up recently in the psychiatrist
of The Cocktail Party, and one may compare the mysterious alche-
mist who is the father of the heroine of The Lady's Not for Burn-
ing. The formula is not confined to comedy: Polonius, who shows
^74
THEORY OF MYTHS
SO many of the disadvantages of a literary education, attempts the
role of a retreating paternal eiron three times, once too often. Hum-
let and King Lear contain subplots which are ironic versions of
stock comic themes, Gloucester's story being the regular comedy
theme of the gullible senex swindled by a clever and unprincipled
son.
We pass now to the buffoon types, those whose function it is to
increase the mood of festivity rather than to contribute to the plot.
Renaissance comedy, unlike Roman comedy, had a great variety of
such characters, professional fools, clowns, pages, singers, and inci-
dental characters with established comic habits like malapropism
or foreign accents. The oldest buffoon of this incidental nature is
the parasite, who may be given something to do, as Jonson gives
Mosca the role of a vice in Volpone, but who, qua parasite, does
nothing but entertain the audience by talking about his appetite.
He derives chiefly from Greek Middle Comedy, which appears to
have been very full of food, and where he was, not unnaturally,
closely associated with another established buffoon type, the cook,
a conventional figure who breaks into comedies to bustle and order
about and make long speeches about the mysteries of cooking. In
the role of cook the buffoon or entertainer appears, not simply as
a gratuitous addition like the parasite, but as something more like
a master of ceremonies, a center for the comic mood. There is no
cook in Shakespeare, though there is a superb description of one
in the Comedy of Errors, but a similar role is often attached to a
jovial and loquacious host, like the "‘mad host" of The Merry
Wives or the Simon Eyre of The Shoemakers Holiday. In Middle-
ton's A Trick to Catch the Old One the mad host type is com-
bined with the vice. In Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch we can see the
affinities of the buffoon or entertainer type both with the parasite
and with the master of revels. If we study this entertainer or host
role carefully we shall soon realize that it is a development of what
in Aristophanic comedy is represented by the chorus, and which
in its turn goes back to the komos or revel from which comedy is
said to be descended.
Finally, there is a fourth group to which we have assigned the
word agroikos, and which usually means either churlish or rustic,
depending on the context. This t)^ may also be extended to cover
the Elizabethan gull and what in vaudeville used to be called the
straight man, the solemn or inarticulate character who allows the
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
humor to bounce off him, so to speak. We find churls in the
miserly, snobbish, or priggish characters whose role is that of the
refuser of festivity, the killjoy who tries to stop the fun, or, like
Malvolio, locks up the food and drink instead of dispensing it. The
melancholy Jaques of As You Like It, who walks out on the final
festivities, is closely related. In the sulky and self-centered Bertram
of AlVs Well there is a most unusual and ingenious combination
of this type with the hero. More often, however, the churl belongs
to the dazon group, all miserly old men in comedies, including
Shylock, being churls. In The Tempest Caliban has much the same
relation to the churlish type that Ariel has to the vice or tricky slave.
But often, where the mood is more light-hearted, we may translate
agroikos simply by rustic, as with the innumerable country squires
and similar characters who provide amusement in the urban set-
ting of drama. Such types do not refuse the mood of festivity, but
they mark the extent of its range. In a pastoral comedy the ideal-
ized virtues of rural life may be represented by a simple man who
speaks for the pastoral ideal, like Corin in As You Like It. Corin
has the same agroikos role as the '‘rube"' or ''hayseed'' of more
citified comedies, but the moral attitude to the role is reversed.
Again we notice the principle that dramatic structure is a perma-
nent and moral attitude a variable factor in literature.
In a very ironic comedy a different type of character may play
the role of the refuser of festivity. The more ironic the comedy,
the more absurd the society, and an absurd society may be con-
demned by, or at least contrasted with, a character that we may
call the plain dealer, an outspoken advocate of a kind of moral
norm who has the sympathy of the audience. Wycherley's Manly,
though he provides the name for the type, is not a particularly
good example of it: a much better one is the CMante of Tartuffe.
Such a character is appropriate when the tone is ironic enough to
get the audience confused about its sense of the social norm: he
corresponds roughly to the chorus in a tragedy, which is there for
a similar reason, ^^en the tone deepens from the ironic to the
bitter, the plain dealer may become a malcontent or railer, who
may be morally superior to his society, as he is to some extent in
Marston's play of that name, but who may also be too motivated
by envy to be much more than another aspect of his society's evil,
like Thersites, or to some extent Apemantus.
THEORY OF MYTHS
In tragedy, pity and fear, the emotions of moral attraction and
repulsion, are raised and cast out. Comedy seems to make a more
functional use of the social, even the moral judgement, than trage-
dy, yet comedy seems to raise the corresponding emotions, which
are sympathy and ridicule, and cast them out in the same way.
Comedy ranges from the most savage irony to the most dreamy
wish-fulfilment romance, but its structural patterns and characteri-
zation are much the same throughout its range. This principle of
the uniformity of comic structure through a variety of attitudes is
clear in Aristophanes. Aristophanes is the most personal of writers,
and his opinions on every subject are written all over his plays. We
know that he wanted peace with Sparta and that he hated Cleon,
so when his comedy depicts the attaining of peace and the defeat
of Cleon we know that he approved and wanted his audience to
approve. But in Ecclesiazusae a band of women in disguise railroad
a communistic scheme through the Assembly which is a horrid
parody of a Platonic republic, and proceed to inaugurate its sexual
communism with some astonishing improvements. Presumably Aris-
tophanes did not altogether endorse this, yet the comedy follows
the same pattern and the same resolution. In The Birds the Peisthe-
tairos who defies Zeus and blocks out Olympus with his Cloud-
Cuckoo-Land is accorded the same triumph that is given to the
Trygaios of the Peace who flies to heaven and brings a golden age
back to Athens.
Let us look now at a variety of comic structures between the
extremes of irony and romance. As comedy blends into irony and
satire at one end and into romance at the other, if there are dif-
ferent phases or types of comic structure, some of them will be
closely parallel to some of the types of irony and of romance. A
somewhat forbidding piece of symmetry turns up in our argument
at this point, which seems to have some literary analogy to the
circle of fifths in music. I recognize six phases of each mythos,
three being parallel to the phases of a neighboring mythos. The
first three phases of comedy are parallel to the first three phases of
irony and satire, and the second three to the second three of ro-
mance. The distinction between an ironic comedy and a comic
satire, or between a romantic comedy and a comic romance, is
tenuous, but not quite a distinction without a difference.
The first or most ironic pha^ of ojmedy is, naturally, the one in
which a humorous society triumphs or remains undefeated. A good
^77
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
example of a comedy of this type is The Alchemist, in which the
returning eiron Lovewit joins the rascals, and the plain dealer Surly
is made a fool of. In The Beggar’s Opera there is a similar twist to
the ending: the (projected) author feels that the hanging of the
hero is a comic ending, but is informed by the manager that the
audience’s sense of comic decorum demands a reprieve, whatever
Macheath’s moral status. This phase of comedy presents what Ren-
aissance critics called speculum consuetudinis, the way of the
world, cost fan tutte. A more intense irony is achieved when the
humorous society simply disintegrates without anything taking its
place, as in Heartbreak House and frequently in Chekhov.
We notice in ironic comedy that the demonic world is never far
away. The rages of the senex iratus in Roman comedy are directed
mainly at the tricky slave, who is threatened with the mill, with
being flogged to death, with crucifixion, with having his head dipped
in tar and set on fire, and the like, all penalties that could be and
were exacted from slaves in life. An epilogue in Plautus informs us
that the slave-actor who has blown up in his lines will now be
flogged; in one of the Menander fragments a slave is tied up and
burned with a torch on the stage. One sometimes gets the impres-
sion that the audience of Plautus and Terence would have guSawed
uproariously all through the Passion. We may ascribe this to the
brutality of a slave society, but then we remember that boiling
oil and burying alive (“such a stuffy death”) turn up in The Mi-
kado. Two lively comedies of the modern stage are The Cocktail
Tarty and The Lady’s Not for Burning, but the cross appears in the
background of the one and the stake in the background of the
other. Shylock’s knife and Angelo’s gallows appear in Shakespeare;
in Measure for Measure every male character is at one time or an-
other threatened with death. The action of comedy moves toward a
deliverance from something which, if absurd, is by no means invaria-
bly harmless. We notice too how frequently a comic dramatist tries
to bring his action as close to a catastrophic overthrow of the hero as
he can get it, and then reverses the action as quickly as possible. The
evading or breaking of a cruel law is often a very narrow squeeze.
The intervention of the king at the end of Tartuffe is deliberately
arbitrary: there is nothing in the action of the play itself to prevent
Tartuffe’s triumph. Tom Jones in the final book, accused of murder,
incest, debt, and double-dealing, cast off by friends, guardian, and
sweetheart, is a woeful figure indeed before all these turn into illu-
THEORY OF MYTHS
sions. Any reader can think of many comedies in which the fear of
death, sometimes a hideous death, hangs over the central character
to the end, and is dispelled so quickly that one has almost the sense
of awakening from nightmare.
Sometimes the redeeming agent actually is divine, like Diana in
Pericles; in Tartuffe it is the king, who is conceived as a part of
the audience and the incarnation of its will. An extraordinary num-
ber of comic stories, both in drama and fiction, seem to approach
a potentially tragic crisis near the end, a feature that I may call the
*'point of ritual death”— a clumsy expression that I would gladly
surrender for a better one. It is a feature not often noticed by critics,
but when it is present it is as unmistakably present as a stretto in
a fugue, which it somewhat resembles. In Smollett's Humphry
Clinker (I select this because no one will suspect Smollett of de-
liberate mythopoeia but only of following convention, at least as
far as his plot is concerned) , the main characters are nearly drowned
in an accident with an upset carriage; they are then taken to a
nearby house to dry off, and a cognitio takes place, in the course
of which their family relationships are regrouped, secrets of birth
brought to light, and names changed. Similar points of ritual death
may be marked in almost any story that imprisons the hero or
gives the heroine a nearly mortal illness before an eventually happy
ending.
Sometimes the point of ritual death is vestigial, not an element
in the plot but a mere change of tone. Everyone will have noted
in comic actions, even in very trivial movies and magazine stories,
a point near the end at which the tone suddenly becomes serious,
sentimental, or ominous of potential catastrophe. In Aldous Hux-
ley's Chrome Yellow, the hero Denis comes to a point of self-evalu-
ation in which suicide nearly suggests itself: in most of Huxley's
later books some violent action, generally suicidal, occurs at the
corresponding point. In Mrs. DcMoway the actual suicide of Septi-
mus becomes a point of ritual death for the heroine in the middk
of her party. There are also some interesting Shakespearean varia-
tions of the device: a clown, for instance, will make a spea:h n^r
the end in which the buffoon's mask suddenly falls off and we look
straight into the face of a beaten and ridiculed slave. Examples
are the speech of Dromio of Ephesus beginning "'I am an in-
deed” in the Comedy of Errors, and the speech of the Clown in
AITs Well beginning '1 am a woodland fellow.”
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
The second phase of comedy, in its simplest form, is a comedy
in which the hero does not transform a humorous society but
simply escapes or runs away from it, leaving its structure as it was
before. A more complex irony in this phase is achieved when a
society is constructed by or around a hero, but proves not sufficiently
real or strong to impose itself. In this situation the hero is usually
himself at least partly a comic humor or mental runaway, and we
have either a hero's illusion thwarted by a superior reality or a
clash of two illusions. This is the quixotic phase of comedy, a dif-
ficult phase for drama, though The Wild Duck is a fairly pure ex-
ample of it, and in drama it usually appears as a subordinate theme
of another phase. Thus in The Alchemist Sir Epicure Mammon's
dream of what he will do with the philosopher’s stone is, like Qui-
xote's, a gigantic dream, and makes him an ironic parody of Faustus
(who is mentioned in the play), in the same way that Quixote is
an ironic parody of Amadis and Lancelot. When the tone is more
light-hearted, the comic resolution may be strong enough to sweep
over all quixotic illusions. In Huckleberry Finn the main theme is
one of the oldest in comedy, the freeing of a slave, and the cognitio
tells us that Jim had already been set free before his escape was
bungled by Tom Sawyer's pedantries. Because of its unrivalled op-
portunities for double-edged irony, this phase is a favorite of Henry
James: perhaps his most searching study of it is The Sacred Fount,
where the hero is an ironic parody of a Prospero figure creating
another society out of the one in front of him.
The third phase of comedy is the normal one that we have been
discussing, in which a senex iratus or other humor gives way to a
young man's desires. The sense of the comic norm is so strong that
when Shakespeare, by way of experiment, tried to reverse the pat-
tern in All's Well, in having two older people force Bertram to
marry Helena, the result has been an unpopular “problem" play,
with a suggestion of something sinister about it. We have noted
that the cognitio of comedy is much concerned with straightening
out the details of the new society, with distinguishing brides from
sisters and parents from foster-parents. The fact that the son and
father are so often in conflict means that they are frequently rivals
for the same girl, and the psychological alliance of the hero's bride
and the mother is often expressed or implied. The occasional
“naughtiness" of comedy, as in the Restoration period, has much
to do, not only with marital infidelity, but with a kind of comic
180
THEORY OF MYTHS
Oedipus situation in which the hero replaces his father as a lover.
In Congreve’s Love for Love there are two Oedipus themes in coun-
terpoint: the hero cheats his father out of the heroine, and his best
friend violates the wife of an impotent old man who is the hero-
ine’s guardian. A theme which would be recognized in real life as
a form of infantile regression, the hero pretending to be impotent
in order to gain admission to the women’s quarters, is employed in
Wycherley’s Country Wife, where it is taken from Terence’s Eu-
nuchus.
The possibilities of incestuous combinations form one of the
minor themes of comedy. The repellent older woman offered to
Figaro in marriage turns out to be his mother, and the fear of vio-
lating a mother also occurs in Tom Jones. When in Ghoats and
Little Eyolf Ibsen employed the old chestnut about the object of
the hero’s affections being his sister (a theme as old as Menander),
his startled hearers took it for a portent of social revolution. In
Shakespeare the recurring and somewhat mysterious father-daughter
relationship already alluded to appears in its incestuous form at the
beginning of Pericles, where it forms the demonic antithesis of
the hero’s union with his wife and daughter at the end. The pre-
siding genius of comedy is Eros, and Eros has to adapt himself to
the moral facts of society: Oedipus and incest themes indicate that
erotic attachments have in their undisplaced or mythical origin a
much greater versatility.
Ambivalent attitudes naturally result, and ambivalence is appar-
ently the main reason for the curious feature of doubled characters
which runs all through the history of comedy. In Roman comedy
there is often a pair of young men, and consequently a pair of
young women, of which one is often related to one of the men
and exogamous to the other. The doubling of the senex figure
sometimes gives us a heavy father for both the hero and the hero-
ine, as in The Wintefs Tde, sometimes a heavy father and benevo-
lent uncle, as in Terence’s Adelphoi and in Tartuffe, and so on.
The action of comedy, like the action of the Christian Bible, moves
from law to liberty. In the law there is an element of ritual bondage
which is abolished, and an element of habit or convention which is
fulfilled. The intolerable qualities of the senex represent the former
and compromise with him the latter in the evolution of the comic
nomos.
With the fourth pha^ of comoiy we b^in to move out of the
i8i
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
world of experience into the ideal world of innocence and romance.
We said that normally the happier society established at the end
of the comedy is left undefined, in contrast to the ritual bondage
of the humors. But it is also possible for a comedy to present its
action on two social planes, of which one is preferred and conse-
quently in some measure idealized. At the beginning of Plato's Re-
public we have a sharp contest between the alazon Thrasymachus
and the ironic Socrates. The dialogue could have stopped there, as
several of Plato's dialogues do, with a negative victory over a humor
and the kind of society he suggests. But in the Republic the rest
of the company, including Thrasymachus, follow Socrates inside
Socrates’s head, so to speak, and contemplate there the pattern
of the just state. In Aristophanes the comic action is often ironic,
but in The Acharnians we have a comedy in which a hero with the
significant name of Dicaeopolis (righteous city or citizen) makes
a private peace with Sparta, celebrates the peaceful festival of
Dionysos with his family, and sets up the pattern of a temperate
social order on the stage, where it remains throughout the play,
cranks, bigots, sharpers, and scoundrels all being beaten away from
it. One of the typical comic actions is at least as clearly portrayed
in our earliest comedy as it has ever been since.
Shakespeare's type of romantic comedy follows a tradition estab-
lished by Peele and developed by Greene and Lyly, which has affini-
ties with the medieval tradition of the seasonal ritual-play. We may
call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to
the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land.
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona the hero Valentine becomes
captain of a band of outlaws in a forest, and all the other characters
are gathered into this forest and become converted. Thus the action
of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world,
moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in
which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal
world. The forest in this play is the embryonic form of the fairy
world of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, the Forest of Arden in As
You Like It, Windsor Forest in The Merry Wives, and the pastoral
world of the mythical sea-coasted Bohemia in The Winter's Tale,
In all these comedies there is the same rhythmic movement from
normal world to green world and back again. In The Merchant of
Venice the second world takes the form of Portia's mysterious
house in Belmont, with its magic caskets and the wonderful cos-
182
THEORY OF MYTHS
mological harmonies that proceed from it in the fifth act. We no-
tice too that this second world is absent from the more ironic come-
dies AlVs Well and Measure for Measure.
The green world charges the comedies with the symbolism of
the victory of summer over winter, as is explicit in Love's Labor's
Lost, where the comic contest takes the form of the medieval de-
bate of winter and spring at the end. In The Merry Wives there is
an elaborate ritual of the defeat of winter known to folklorists as
''carrying out Death,'' of which Falstaff is the victim; and Falstaff
must have felt that, after being thrown into the water, dressed up
as a witch and beaten out of a house with curses, and finally sup-
plied with a beast's head and singed with, candles, he had done
about all that could reasonably be asked of any fertility spirit.
In the rituals and myths the earth that produces the rebirth is
generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or disap-
pearance and withdrawal, of human figures in romantic comedy
generally involves the heroine. The fact that the heioine often
brings about the comic resolution by disguising herself as a boy is
familiar enough. The treatment of Hero in Much Ado, of Helena
in AlVs Well, of Thaisa in Pericles, of Fidele in Cymbeline, of
Hermione in The Winter's Tale, show the repetition of a device in
which progressively less care is taken of plausibility and in which
in consequence the mythical outline of a Proserpine figure becomes
progressively clearer. These are Shakespearean examples of the
comic theme of ritual assault on a central female figure, a theme
which stretches from Menander to contemporary soap operas. Many
of Menander's plays have titles which are feminine participles in-
dicating the particular indignity the heroine suffers in them, and
the working formula of the soap opera is said to be to "put the
heroine behind the eight-ball and keep her there." Treatments of
the theme may be as light-hearted as The Rape of the Lock or as
doggedly persistent as Pamela. However, the theme of rebirth is not
invariably feminine in context: the rejuvenation of the senex in
Aristophanes' The Knights, and a similar theme in AlVs Well based
on the folklore motif of the healing of the impotent king, come
readily to mind.
The green world has analogies, not only to the fertile world of
ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of our own de-
sires. This dream world collides with the stumbling and blinded
follies of the world of experience, of Theseus' Athens with its idi-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
otic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny,
of Leontes and his mad jealousy, of the Court Party with their
plots and intrigues, and yet proves strong enough to impose the
form of desire on it. Thus Shakespearean comedy illustrates, as
clearly as any mythos we have, the archetypal function of litera-
ture in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from '"real-
ity/^ but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries
to imitate.
In the fifth phase of comedy, some of the themes of which we
have already anticipated, we move into a world that is still more
romantic, less Utopian and more Arcadian, less festive and more
pensive, where the comic ending is less a matter of the way the
plot turns out than of the perspective of the audience. When we
compare the Shakespearean fourth-phase comedies with the late
fifth-phase “romances,'' we notice how much more serious an
action is appropriate to the latter: they do not avoid tragedies but
contain them. The action seems to be not only a movement from
a “winter's tale" to spring, but from a lower world of confusion
to an upper world of order. The closing scene of The Winter's Tale
makes us think, not simply of a cyclical movement from tragedy
and absence to happiness and return, but of bodily metamorphosis
and a transformation from one kind of life to another. The ma-
terials of the cognitio of Pericles or The Winter's Tale are so
stock that they would be “hooted at like an old tale," yet they
seem both far-fetched and inevitably right, outraging reality and
at the same time introducing us to a world of childlike innocence
which has always made more sense than reality.
In this phase the reader or audience feels raised above the action,
in the situation of which Christopher Sly is an ironic parody. The
plotting of Cleon and Dionyza in Pericles, or of the Court Party in
The Tempest, we look down on as generic or typical human be-
havior: the action, or at least the tragic implication of the action,
is presented as though it were a play within a play that we can see
in all dimensions at once. We see the action, in short, from the
point of view of a higher and better ordered world. And as the
forest in Shakespeare is the usual symbol for the dream world in
conflict with and imposing its form on experience, so the usual
S5Tnbol for the lower or chaotic world is the sea, from which the
cast, or an important part of it, is saved. The group of “sea" come-
dies includes A Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles, and
THEORY OF MYTHS
The Tempest A Comedy of Errors, though based on a Plautine
original, is much closer to the world of Apuleius than to that of
Plautus in its imagery, and the main action, moving from shipwreck
and separation to reunion in a temple in Ephesus, is repeated in
the much later play of Pericles. And just as the second world is
absent from the two 'problem'' comedies, so in two of the "sea"
group. Twelfth Night and The Tempest, the entire action takes
place in the second world. In Measure for Measure the Duke dis-
appears from the action and returns at the end; The Tempest seems
to present the same type of action inside out, as the entire cast
follows Prospero into his retreat, and is shaped into a new social
order there.
These five phases of comedy may be seen as a sequence of stages
in the life of a redeemed society. Purely ironic comedy exhibits
this society in its infancy, swaddled and smothered by the society
it should replace. Quixotic comedy exhibits it in adolescence, still
too ignorant of the ways of the world to impose itself. In the third
phase it comes to maturity and triumphs; in the fourth it is already
mature and established. In the fifth it is part of a settled order
which has been there from the beginning, an order which takes on
an increasingly religious cast and seems to be drawing away from
human experience altogether. At this point the undisplaced corn-
media, the vision of Dante's Paradiso, moves out of our circle of
mythoi into the apocalyptic or abstract mythical world above it.
At this point we realize that the crudest of Plautine comedy-
formulas has much the same structure as the central Christian
myth itself, with its divine son appeasing the wrath of a father
and redeeming what is at once a society and a bride.
At this point too comedy proper enters its final or sixth phase,
the phase of the collapse and disintegration of the comic society.
In this phase the social units of comedy become small and esoteric,
or even confined to a single individual. Secret and sheltered places,
forests in moonlight, secluded valleys, and happy islands become
more prominent, as does the penseroso mood of romance, the love
of the occult and the marvellous, the sense of individual detach-
ment from routine existence. In this kind of comedy we have finally
left the world of wit and the awakened critical intelligence for the
opposite pole, an oracular solemnity which, if we surrender un-
critically to it, will provide a delightful frisson. This is the world
of ghost stories, thrillers, and Gothic romances, and, on a more
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
sophisticated level, the kind of imaginative withdrawal portrayed
in Huysmans' A Rebours, The somberness of Des Esseintes' sur-
roundings has nothing to do with tragedy: Des Esseintes is a dilet-
tante trying to amuse himself. The comic society has run the full
course from infancy to death, and in its last phase myths closely
connected psychologically with a return to the womb are appro-
priate.
THE MYTHOS OF SUMMER: ROMANCE
The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment
aream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical
role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to
project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous
heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains
the threats to their ascendancy. This is the general character of
chivalric romance in the Middle Ages, aristocratic romance in the
Renaissance, bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, and
revolutionary romance in contemporary Russia. Yet there is a
genuinely "‘proletarian'" element in romance too which is never
satisfied with its various incarnations, and in fact the incarnations
themselves indicate that no matter how great a change may take
place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever,
looking for new hopes and desires to feed on. The perennially child-
like quality of romance is marked by its extraordinarily persistent
nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in
time or space. There has never to my knowledge been any period
of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic revivalists
stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf
poet to writers of our own day.
The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which
means that romance is naturally a sequential and processional
form, hence we know it better from fiction than from drama. At
its most naive it is an endless form in which a central character
who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after an-
other until the author himself collapses. We see this form in
comic strips, where the central characters persist for years in a
state of refrigerated deathlessness. However, no book can rival
the continuity of the newspaper, and as soon as romance achieves
a literary form, it tends to limit itself to a sequence of minor ad-
186
THEORY OF MYTHS
ventures leading up to a major or climacteric adventure, usually
announced from the beginning, the completion of which rounds
ojff the story. We may call this major adventure, the element that
gives literary form to the romance, the quest.
The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful
quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage
of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the
crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the
hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.
We may call these three stages respectively, using Greek terms,
the agon or conflict, the pathos or death-struggle, and the anag-
norisis or discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly
proved himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict.
Thus the romance expresses more clearly the passage from struggle
through a point of ritual death to a recognition scene that we
discovered in comedy. A threefold structure is repeated in many
features of romance— in the frequency, for instance, with which
the successful hero is a third son, or the third to undertake the
quest, or successful on his third attempt. It is shown more directly
in the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance and revival which
is found in the myth of Attis and other dying gods, and has been
incorporated in our Easter.
A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a pro-
tagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy. (No doubt I should
add, for the benefit of some readers, that I have read the article
''Protagonist'' in Fowler's Modern English Usage.) The enemy
may be an ordinary human being, but the nearer the romance is
to myth, the more attributes of divinity will cling to the hero and
the more the enemy will take on demonic mythical qualities. The
central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focussed on a
conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader's values
are bound up with the hero. Hence the hero of romance is analo-
gous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an
upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic pow-
ers of a lower world. The conflict however takes place in, or at
any rate primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle,
and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature.
Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated
to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is as-
sociated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life,
THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor,
and youth. As all the cyclical phenomena can be readily associ-
ated or identified, it follows that any attempt to prove that a ro-
mantic story does or does not resemble, say, a solar myth, or that
its hero does or does not resemble a sun-god, is likely to be a
waste of time. If it is a story within this general area, cyclical
imager}^ is likely to be present, and solar imagery is normally promi-
nent among cyclical images. If the hero of a romance returns
from a quest disguised, flings off his beggar's rags, and stands forth
in the resplendent scarlet cloak of the prince, we do not have a
theme which has necessarily descended from a solar myth; we
have the literary device of displacement. The hero does something
which we may or may not, as we like, associate with the myth of
the sun returning at dawn. If we are reading the story as critics,
with an eye to structural principles, we shall make the association,
because the solar analogy explains why the hero's act is an effective
and conventional incident. If we are reading the story for fun, we
need not bother: that is, some murky ''subconscious'' factor in our
response will take care of the association.
We have distinguished myth from romance by the hero's power
of action: in the myth proper he is divine, in the romance proper
he is human. This distinction is much sharper theologically than
it is poetically, and myth and romance both belong in the general
category of mythopoeic literature. The attributing of divinity to
the chief characters of myth, however, tends to give myth a further
distinction, already referred to, of occupying a central canonical
position. Most cultures regard certain stories with more reverence
than others, either because they are thought of as historically true
or because they have come to bear a heavier weight of conceptual
meaning. The story of Adam and Eve in Eden has thus a canonical
position for poets in our tradition whether they believe in its his-
toricity or not. The reason for the greater profundity of canonical
myth is not solely tradition, but the result of the greater degree
of metaphorical identification that is possible is myth. In literary
criticism the myth is normally the metaphorical key to the displace-
ments of romance, hence the importance of the quest-myth of the
Bible in what follows. But because of the tendency to expurgate
and moralize in canonical myth, the less inhibited area of legend
and folk tale often contains an equally great concentration of
mythical meaning.
i88
THEORY OF MYTHS
The central form of quest-romance is the dragon-killing theme
exemplified in the stories of St. George and Perseus, already re-
ferred to. A land ruled by a helpless old king is laid waste by a sea-
monster, to whom one young person after another is offered to be
devoured, until the lot falls on the king's daughter: at that point
the hero arrives, kills the dragon, marries the daughter, and suc-
ceeds to the kingdom. Again, as with comedy, we have a simple
pattern with many complex elements. The ritual analogies of the
myth suggest that the monster is the sterility of the land itself,
and that the sterility of the land is present in the age and impo-
tence of the king, who is sometimes suffering from an incurable
malady or wound, like Amfortas in Wagner. His position is that
of Adonis overcome by the boar of winter, Adonis's traditional
thigh-wound being as close to castration symbolically as it is
anatomically.
In the Bible we have a sea-monster usually named leviathan,
who is described as the enemy of the Messiah, and whom the Mes-
siah is destined to kill in the “day of the Lord." The leviathan is
the source of social sterility, for it is identified with Egypt and
Babylon, the oppressors of Israel, and is described in the Book of
Job as '‘king over all the children of pride." It also seems closely
associated with the natural sterility of the fallen world, with the
blasted world of struggle and poverty and disease into which Job
is hurled by Satan and Adam by the serpent in Eden. In the Book
of Job God's revelation to Job consists largely of descriptions of the
leviathan and a slightly less sinister land cousin named behemoth.
These monsters thus apparently represent the fallen order of nature
over which Satan has some control. (I am trying to make sense
of the meaning of the Book of Job as we now have it, on the
assumption that whoever was responsible for its present version
had some reason for producing that version. Guesswork about what
the poem may originally have been or meant is useless, as it is
only the version we know that has had any influence on our litera-
ture.) In the Book of Revelation the leviathan, Satan, and the
Edenic serpent are all identified. This identification is the basis
for an elaborate dragon-killing metaphor in Christian symbolism
in which the hero is Christ (often represented in art standing on
a prostrate monster), the dragon Satan, the impotent old king
Adam, whose son Christ becomes, and the rescued bride the
Church.
THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
Now if the leviathan is the whole fallen world of sin and death
and tyranny into which Adam fell, it follows that Adam's children
are born, live, and die inside his belly. Hence if the Messiah is to
deliver us by killing the leviathan, he releases us. In the folk tale
versions of dragon-killing stories we notice how frequently the
previous victims of the dragon come out of him alive after he is
killed. Again, if we are inside the dragon, and the hero comes to
help us, the image is suggested of the hero going down the monster s
open throat, like Jonah (whom Jesus accepted as a prototype of
himself), and returning with his redeemed behind him. Hence the
symbolism of the Harrowing of Hell, hell being regularly repre-
sented in iconography by the “toothed gullet of an aged shark,”
to quote a modern reference to it. Secular versions of journeys
inside monsters occur from Lucian to our day, and perhaps even
the Trojan horse had originally some links with the same theme.
The image of the dark winding labyrinth for the monster's belly
is a natural one, and one that frequently appears in heroic quests,
notably that of Theseus. A less displaced version of the story of
Theseus would have shown him emerging from the labyrinth at
the head of a procession of the Athenian youths and maidens
previously sacrificed to the Minotaur. In many solar myths, too,
the hero travels perilously through a dark labyrinthine underworld
full of monsters between sunset and sunrise. This theme may be-
come a structural principle of fiction on any level of sophistication.
One would expect to find it in fairy tales or children's stories, and
in fact if we “stand back” from Tom Sawyer we can see a youth
with no father or mother emerging with a maiden from a laby-
rinthine cave, leaving a bat-eating demon imprisoned behind him.
But in the most complex and elusive of the later stories of Henry
James, The Sense of the Past, the same theme is used, the laby-
rinthine underworld being in this case a period of past time from
which the hero is released by the sacrifice of a heroine, an Ariadne
figure. In this story, as in many folktales, the motif of the two
brothers connected by sympathetic magic of some sort is also
employed.
In the Old Testament the Messiah-figure of Moses leads his
people out of Egypt. The Pharaoh of Egypt is identified with the
leviathan by Ezekiel, and the fact that the infant Moses was
rescued by Pharaoh's daughter gives to the Pharaoh something of
the role of the cruel father-figure who seeks the hero's death, a role
190
THEORY OF MYTHS
also taken by the raging Herod of the miracle plays. Moses and
the Israelites wander through a labyrinthine desert, after which
the reign of the law ends and the conquest of the Promised Land
is achieved by Joshua, whose name is the same as that of Jesus.
Thus when the angel Gabriel tells the Virgin to call her son Jesus,
the typological meaning is that the era of the law is over, and the
assault on the Promised Land is about to begin. Tlaere are thus
two concentric quest-myths in the Bible, a Genesis-apocalypse myth
and an Exodus-millennium myth. In the former Adam is cast out
of Eden, loses the river of life and the tree of life, and wanders
in the labyrinth of human history until he is restored to his original
state by the Messiah. In the latter Israel is cast out of his inherit-
ance and wanders in the labyrinths of Egyptian and Babylonian
captivity until he is restored to his original state in the Promised
Land. Eden and the Promised Land, therefore, are typologically
identical, as are the tyrannies of Egypt and Babylon and the wilder-
ness of the law. Paradise Regained deals with the temptation of
Christ by Satan, which is, Michael tells us in Paradise Lost, the
true form of the dragon-killing myth assigned to the Messiah.
Christ is in the situation of Israel under the law, wandering in the
wilderness: his victory is at once the conquest of the Promised Land
typified by his namesake Joshua and the raising of Eden in the
wilderness.
The leviathan is usually a sea-monster, which means metaphori-
cally that he is the sea, and the prophecy that the Lord will hook
and land the leviathan in Ezekiel is identical with the prophecy
in Revelation that there shall be no more sea. As denizens of his
belly, therefore, we are also metaphorically under water. Hence
the importance of fishing in the Gospels, the apostles being ‘'fish-
ers of men” who cast their nets into the sea of this world. Hence,
too, the later development, referred to in The Waste Land, of
Adam or the impotent king as an ineffectual “fisher king.” In the
same poem the appropriate link is also made with Prosperous
rescuing of a society out of the sea in The Tempest In other
comedies, too, ranging from Sakuntala to Rudens, something in-
dispensable to the action or the cognitio is fished out of the sea,
and many quest heroes, including Beowulf, achieve their greatest
feats under water. The insistence on Christ's ability to command
the sea belongs to the same aspect of symbolism. And as the
leviathan, in his aspect as the fallen world, contains all forms of
191
THIRD essay: archetypal criticism
life imprisoned within himself, so as the sea he contains the im-
prisoned life-giving rain waters whose coming marks the spring.
The monstrous animal who swallows all the water in the world
and is then teased or tricked or forced into disgorging it is a favorite
of folk tales, and a Mesopotamian version lies close behind the
story of Creation in Genesis. In many solar myths the sun god
is represented as sailing in a boat on the surface of our world.
Lastly, if the leviathan is death, and the hero has to enter the
body of death, the hero has to die, and if his quest is completed the
final stage of it is, cyclically, rebirth, and, dialectically, resurrection.
In the St. George plays the hero dies in his dragon-fight and is
brought to life by a doctor, and the same symbolism runs through
all the dying-god myths. There are thus not three but four dis-
tinguishable aspects to the quest-myth. First, the agon or conflict
itself. Second, the pathos or death, often the mutual death of
hero and monster. Third, the disappearance of the hero, a theme
which often takes the form of sparagmos or tearing to pieces. Some-
times the hero’s body is divided among his followers, as in Eucharist
symbolism: sometimes it is distributed around the natural world,
as in the stories of Orpheus and more especially Osiris. Fourth, the
reappearance and recognition of the hero, where sacramental Chris-
tianity follows the metaphorical logic: those who in the fallen
world have partaken of their redeemer's divided body are united
with his risen body.
The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance,
tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central
unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme
of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous
adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in de-
feat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense
that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or fore-
doomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the
world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or
recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still
somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme
of comedy.
We have spoken of the Messianic hero as a redeemer of society,
but in the secular quest-romances more obvious motives and re-
wards for the quest are more common. Often the dragon guards
THEORY OF MYTHS
a hoard: the quest for buried treasure has been a central theme of
romance from the Siegfried cycle to Nostromo, and is unlikely
to be exhausted yet. Treasure means wealth, which in mythopoeic
romance often means wealth in its ideal forms, power and wisdom.
The lower world, the world inside or behind the guarding dragon,
is often inhabited by a prophetic sibyl, and is a place of oracles
and secrets, such as Woden was willing to mutilate himself to
obtain. Mutilation or physical handicap, which combines the
themes of spara^mos and ritual death, is often the price of unusual
wisdom or power, as it is in the figure of the crippled smith Wey-
land or Hephaistos, and in the story of the blessing of Jacob. The
Arabian Nights are full of stories of what may be called the
etiology of mutilation. Again, the reward of the quest usually is
or includes a bride. This bride-figure is ambiguous: her psycho-
logical connection with the mother in an Oedipus fantasy is more
insistent than in comedy. She is often to be found in a perilous,
forbidden, or tabooed place, like Brunnhilde's wall of fire or the
sleeping beauty's wall of thorns, and she is, of course, often rescued
from the unwelcome embraces of another and generally older male,
or from giants or bandits or other usurpers. The removal of some
stigma from the heroine figures prominently in romance as in
comedy, and ranges from the ''loathly lady" theme of Chaucer's
Wife of BatKs Tale to the forgiven harlot of the Book of Hosea.
The "black but comely" bride of the Song of Songs belongs in
the same complex.
The quest-romance has analogies to both rituals and dreams,
and the rituals examined by Frazer and the dreams examined by
Jung show the remarkable similarity in form that we should expect
of two symbolic structures analogous to the same thing. Trans-
lated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the
libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the
anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality. The antago-
nists of the quest are often sinister figures, giants, ogres, witches
and magicians, that clearly have a parental origin; and yet redeemed
and emancipated paternal figures are involved too, as they are in
the psychological quests of both Freud and Jung. Translated into
ritual terms, the quest-romance is the victory of fertility over the
waste land. Fertility means food and drink, bread and wine, body
and blood, the union of male and female. The precious objects
brought back from the quest, or seen or obtained as a result of it,
^93
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
sometimes combine the ritual and the psychological associations.
The Holy Grail, for instance, is connected with Christian Eucharist
symbolism; it is related to or descended from a miraculous food-
provider like the cornucopia, and, like other cups and hollow
vessels, it has female sexual affinities, its masculine counterpart
being, we are told, the bleeding lance. The pairing of solid food
and liquid refreshment recurs in the edible tree and the water
of life in the Biblical apocalypse.
We may take the first book of The Faerie Queene as representing
perhaps the closest following of the Biblical quest-romance theme
in English literature: it is closer even than The Pilgrim's Progress,
which resembles it because they both resemble the Bible. Attempts
to compare Bunyan and Spenser without reference to the Bible,
or to trace their similarities to a common origin in secular romance,
are more or less perverse. In Spenser's account of the quest of St.
George, the patron saint of England, the protagonist represents the
Christian Church in England, and hence his quest is an imitation
of that of Christ. Spenser's Redcross Knight is led by the lady
Una (who is veiled in black) to the kingdom of her parents, which
is being laid waste by a dragon. The dragon is of somewhat unusual
size, at least allegorically. We are told that Una's parents held “all
the world" in their control until the dragon “Forwasted all their
land, and them expelled." Una's parents are Adam and Eve; their
kingdom is Eden or the unfallen world, and the dragon, who is
the entire fallen world, is identified with the leviathan, the serpent
of Eden, Satan, and the beast of Revelation. Thus St. George's
mission, a repetition of that of Christ, is by killing the dragon to
raise Eden in the wilderness and restore England to the status of
Eden. The association of an ideal England with Eden, assisted by
legends of a happy island in the western ocean and by the similarity
of the Hesperides story to that of Eden, runs through English litera-
ture at least from the end of Greene's Friar Bacon to Blake's “Jeru-
salem" hymn. St. George's wanderings with Una, or without her,
are parallel to the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness,
between Egypt and the Promised Land, bearing the veiled ark of
the covenant and yet ready to worship a golden calf.
The battle with the dragon lasts, of course, three days: at the
end of each of the first two days St. George is beaten back and
is strengthened, first by the water of life, then by the tree of life.
Tliese represent the two sacraments which the reformed church
THEORY OF MYTHS
accepted; they are the two features of the garden of Eden to be
restored to man in the apocalypse, and they have also a more gen-
eral Eucharist connection. St. George's emblem is a red cross on
a white ground, which is the flag borne by Christ in traditional
iconography when he returns in triumph from the prostrate dragon
of hell. The red and white symbolize the two aspects of the risen
body, flesh and blood, bread and wine, and in Spenser they have
a historical connection with the union of red and white roses in
the reigning head of the church. The link between the sacramental
and the sexual aspects of the red and white symbolism is indicated
in alchemy, with which Spenser was clearly acquainted, in which
a crucial phase of the production of the elixir of immortality is
known as the union of the red king and the white queen.
The characterization of romance follows its general dialectic
structure, which means that subtlety and complexity are not much
favored. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If
they assist it they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they
obstruct it they are caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly.
Hence every typical character in romance tends to have his moral
opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess
game. In romance the 'Vhite" pieces who strive for the quest corre-
spond to the eiron group in comedy, though the word is no longer
appropriate, as irony has little place in romance. Romance has a
counterpart to the benevolent retreating eiron of comedy in its
figure of the ''old wise man," as Jung calls him, like Prospero, Mer-
lin, or the palmer of Spenser's second quest, often a magician who
affects the action he watches over. The Arthur of The Faerie
Queene, though not an old man, has this function. He has a
feminine counterpart in the sibylline wise mother-figure, often a
potential bride like Solveig in Peer Gynt, who sits quietly at home
waiting for the hero to finish his wanderings and come back to her.
This latter figure is often the lady for whose sake or at whose bid-
ding the quest is performed: she is represented by the Faerie
Queene in Spenser and by Athene in the Perseus story. These are
the king and queen of the white pieces, though their power of
movement is of course reversed in actual chess. The disadvantage
of making the queen-figure the hero's mistress, in anything more
than a political sense, is that she spoils his fun with the distressed
daihsels he meets on his journey, who are often enticingly tied
195
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
naked to rocks or trees, like Andromeda or Angelica in Ariosto. A
polarization may thus be set up between the lady of duty and the
lady of pleasure— we have already glanced at a late development
of this in the light and dark heroines of Victorian romance. One
simple way out is to make the former the latter's mother-in-law:
a theme of reconciliation after enmity and jealousy most commonly
results, as in the relations of Psyche and Venus in Apuleius. Where
there is no reconciliation, the older female remains sinister, the
cruel stepmother of folk tale.
The evil magician' and the witch, Spenser's Archimago and
Duessa, are the black king and queen. The latter is appropriately
called by Jung the “terrible mother," and he associates her with
the fear of incest and with such hags as Medusa who seem to have
a suggestion of erotic perversion about them. The redeemed figures,
apart from the bride, are generally too weak to be strongly charac-
terized. The faithful companion or shadow figure of the hero has
his opposite in the traitor, the heroine her opposite in the siren
or beautiful witch, the dragon his opposite in the friendly or help-
ing animals that are so conspicuous in romance, among which the
horse who gets the hero to his quest has naturally a central place.
The conflict of son and father that we noted in comedy recurs in
romance: in the Bible the second Adam comes to the rescue of the
first one, and in the Grail cycle the pure son Galahad accomplishes
what his impure father Lancelot failed in.
The characters who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and
villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature. They represent
partly the moral neutrality of the intermediate world of nature
and partly a world of mystery which is glimpsed but never seen, and
which retreats when approached. Among female characters of this
type are the shy nymphs of Classical legends and the elusive half-
wild creatures who might be called daughter-figures, and include
Spenser's Florimell, Hawthorne's Pearl, Wagner's Kundry, and Hud-
son's Rima. Their male counterparts have a little more variety. Kip-
ling's Mowgli is the best known of the wild boys; a green man lurked
in the forests of medieval England, appearing as Robin Hood and as
the knight of Gawain's adventure; the “salvage man," represented
in Spenser by Satyrane, is a Renaissance favorite, and the awkward
but faithful giant with unkempt hair has shambled amiably through
romance for centuries.
Such characters are, more or less, children of nature, who can
THEORY OF MYTHS
be brought to serve the hero^ like Crusoe’s Friday, but retain the
inscrutability of their origin. As servants or friends of the hero,
they impart the mysterious rapport with nature that so often marks
the central figure of romance. The paradox that many of these
children of nature are ''supernatural” beings is not as distressing
in romance as in logic. The helpful fairy, the grateful dead man,
the wonderful servant who has just the abilities the hero needs
in a crisis, are all folk tale commonplaces. They are romantic in-
tensifications of the comic tricky slave, the author’s architectus.
In James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks this character type is
called the "Golux,” and there is no reason why the word should not
be adopted as a critical term.
In romance, as in comedy, there seem to be four poles of char-
acterization. The struggle of the hero with his enemy corresponds
to the comic contest of eiron and alazon. In the nature-spirits just
referred to we find the parallel in romance to the buffoon or master
of ceremonies in comedy: that is, their function is to intensify and
provide a focus for the romantic mood. It remains to be seen if
there is a character in romance corresponding to the agroikos type
in comedy, the refuser of festivity or rustic clown.
Such a character would call attention to realistic aspects of life,
like fear in the presence of danger, which threaten the unity of
the romantic mood. St. George and Una in Spenser are accom-
panied by a dwarf who carries a bag of "needments.” He is not a
traitor, like the other bag-carrier Judas Iscariot, but he is "fearful,”
and urges retreat when the going is difficult. This dwarf with his
needments represents, in the dream world of romance, the shrunken
and wizened form of practical waking reality: the more realistic
the story, the more important such a figure would become, until,
when we reach the opposite pole in Don Quixote, he achieves his
apotheosis as Sancho Panza. In other romances we find fools and
jesters who are licensed to show fear or make realistic comments,
and who provide a localized safety valve for realism without allow-
ing it to disrupt the conventions of romance. In Malory a similar
role is assumed by Sir Dinadan, who, it is carefully explained, is
really a gallant knight as well as a jester: hence when he makes
jokes "the king and Launcelot laughed that they might not sit”—
the suggestion of excessive and hysterical laughter being psycho-
logically very much to the point.
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases, and as it moves
from the tragic to the comic area, the first three are parallel to
the first three phases of tragedy and the second three to the second
three phases of comedy, already examined from the comic point
of view. The phases form a cyclical sequence in a romantic hero's
life.
The first phase is the myth of the birth of the hero, the mor-
phology of which has been studied in some detail in folklore. This
myth is often associated with a flood, the regular symbol of the
beginning and the end of a cycle. The infant hero is often placed
in an ark or chest fioating on the sea, as in the story of Perseus;
from there he drifts to land, as in the exordium to Beowulf, or is
rescued from among reeds and bulrushes on a river bank, as in the
story of Moses. A landscape of water, boat, and reeds appears at
the beginning of Dante's journey up the mount of Purgatory,
where there are many suggestions that the soul is in that stage a
newborn infant. On dry land the infant may be rescued either
from or by an animal, and many heroes are nurtured by animals
in a forest during their nonage. When Goethe's Faust begins to
look for his Helena, he searches in the reeds of the Peneus, and
then finds a centaur who carried her to safety on his back when
she was a child.
Psychologically, this image is related to the embryo in the womb,
the world of the unborn often being thought of as liquid; anthropo-
logically, it is related to the image of seeds of new life buried in a
dead world of snow or swamp. The dragon's treasure hoard is closely
linked with this mysterious infant life enclosed in a chest. The fact
that the real source of wealth is potential fertility or new life,
vegetable or human, has run through romance from ancient myths
to Ruskin's King of the Golden River, Ruskin's treatment of wealth
in his economic works being essentially a commentary on this fairy
tale. A similar association of treasure hoard and infant life appears
in more plausible guise in Silas Marner. The long literary history
of the theme of mysterious parentage from Euripides to Dickens
has already been mentioned.
In the Bible the end of a historical cycle and the birth of a new
one is marked by parallel symbols. First we have a universal deluge
and an ark, with the potency of all future life contained in it, float-
ing on the waters; then we have the story of the Eg}q)tian host
drowned in the Red Sea and the Israelites set free to carry their
THEORY OF MYTHS
ark through the wilderness, an image adopted by Dante as the basis
of his purgatorial symbolism. The New Testament begins with an
infant in a manger, and the tradition of depicting the world outside
as sunk in snow relates the Nativity to the same archetypal phase.
Images of returning spring soon follow: the rainbow in the Noah
story, the bringing of water out of a rock by Moses, the baptism of
Christ, all show the turning of the cycle from the wintry water of
death to the reviving waters of life. The providential birds, the
raven and dove in the Noah story, the ravens feeding Elijah in the
wilderness, the dove hovering over Jesus, belong to the same com-
plex.
Often, too, there is a search for the child, who has to be hidden
away in a secret place. The hero being of mysterious origin, his
true paternity is often concealed, and a false father appears who
seeks the child's death. This is the role of Acrisius in the Perseus
story, of the Cronos of Hesiodic myth who tries to swallow his
children, of the child-killing Pharaoh in the Old Testament, and
of Herod in the New. In later fiction he often modulates to the
usurping wicked uncle who appears several times in Shakespeare.
The mother is thus often the victim of jealousy, persecuted or
calumniated like the mother of Perseus or like Constance in the
Man of Law's Tale. This version is very close psychologically to the
theme of the rivalry of the son and a hateful father for possession
of the mother. The theme of the calumniated girl ordered out of
the house with her child by a cruel father, generally into the snow,
still drew tears from audiences of Victorian melodramas, and lit-
erary developments of the theme of the hunted mother in the same
period extend from Eliza crossing the ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin
to Adam Bede and Far from the Madding Crowd. The false mother,
the celebrated cruel stepmother, is also common: her victim is of
course usually female, and the resulting conflict is portrayed in
many ballads and folktales of the Cinderella type. The true father
is sometimes represented by a wise old man or teacher: this is the
relation of Prospero to Ferdinand, as well as of Chiron the centaur
to Achilles. The double of the true mother appears in the daughter
of Pharaoh who adopts Moses. In more realistic modes the cruel
parent speaks with the voice of, or takes the form of, a narrow-
minded public opinion.
The second phase brings us to the innocent youth of the hero,
a phase most familiar to us from the story of Adam and Eve in
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
Eden before the Fall. In literature this phase presents a pastoral
and Arcadian world, generally a pleasant wooded landscape, full
of glades, shaded valleys, murmuring brooks, the moon, and other
images closely linked with the female or maternal aspect of sexual
imagery. Its heraldic colors are green and gold, traditionally the
colors of vanishing youth: one thinks of Sandburg's poem Between
Two Worlds. It is often a world of magic or desirable law, and it
tends to center on a youthful hero, still overshadowed by parents,
surrounded by youthful companions. The archetype of erotic in-
nocence is less commonly marriage than the kind of ''chaste" love
that precedes marriage; the love of brother for sister, or of two boys
for each other. Hence, though in later phases it is often recalled as
a lost happy time or Golden Age, the sense of being close to a moral
taboo is very frequent, as it is of course in the Eden story itself.
Johnson's Rasselas, Poe's Eleanora, and Blake's Book of Thel in-
troduce us to a kind of prison-Paradise or unborn world from which
the central characters long to escape to a lower world, and the same
feeling of malaise and longing to enter a world of action recurs in
the most exhaustive treatment of the phase in English literature,
Keats's Endymion.
The theme of the sexual barrier in this phase takes many forms:
the serpent of the Eden story recurs in Green Mansions, and a bar-
rier of fire separates Amoret in Spenser from her lover Scudamour.
At the end of the Purgatorio the soul reaches again its unfallen
childhood or lost Golden Age, and Dante consequently finds him-
self in the garden of Eden, separated from the young girl Matelda
by the river Lethe. The dividing river recurs in William Morris's
curious story The Sundering Flood, where an arrow shot over it has
to do for the symbol of sexual contact. In Kubla Khan, which is
closely related both to the Eden story in Paradise Lost and to Ros-
selas, a "sacred river" is closely followed by the distant vision of a
singing damsel. Melville's Pierre opens with a sardonic parody of
this phase, the hero still dominated by his mother but calling her
his sister. A good deal of the imagery of this world may be found in
the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, especially in the stories of
Tristram and Pastorella.
The third phase is the normal quest theme that we have been
discussing, and needs no further comment at this point. The fourth
phase corresponds to the fourth phase of comedy, in which the
happier society is more or less visible throughout the action instead
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THEORY OF MYTHS
of emerging only in the last few moments. In romance the central
theme of this phase is that of the maintaining of the integrity of
the innocent world against the assault of experience. It thus often
takes the form of a moral allegory, such as we have in Milton's
Comus, Bunyan's Holy War, and many morality plays, including
The Castell of PeTseyeraunce, The much simpler scheme of the
Canterbury Tales, where the only conflict is to preserve the mood
of holiday and festivity against bickering, seems for some reason to
be less frequent.
The integrated body to be defended may be individual or social,
or both. The individual aspect of it is presented in the allegory of
temperance in the second book of The Faerie Queene, which forms
a natural sequel to the first book, dealing as it does with the more
diEcult theme of consolidating heroic innocence in this world after
the first great quest has been completed. Guyon, the knight of tem-
perance, has as his main antagonists Acrasia, the mistress of the
Bower of Bliss, and Mammon. These represent ''Beauty and
money," in their aspects as instrumental goods perverted into ex-
ternal goals. The temperate mind contains its good within itself,
continence being its prerequisite, hence it belongs to what we have
called the innocent world. The intemperate mind seeks its good in
the external object of the world of experience. Both temperance
and intemperance could be called natural, but one belongs to na-
ture as an order and the other to nature as a fallen world. Comus's
temptation of the Lady is based on a similar ambiguity in the mean-
ing of nature. A central image in this phase of romance is that of
the beleaguered castle, represented in Spenser by the House of
Alma, which is described in terms of the economy of the human
body.
The social aspect of the same phase is treated in the fifth book
of The Faerie Queene, the legend of justice, where power is the
prerequisite of justice, corresponding to continence in relation to
temperance. Here we meet, in the vision of Isis and Osiris, the
fourth-phase image of the monster tamed and controlled by the
virgin, an image which appears episodically in Book One in con-
nection with Una, who tames satyrs and a lion. The Classical proto-
type of it is the Gorgon's head on the shield of Athene. The theme
of invincible innocence or virginity is associated with similar images
in literature from the child leading the beasts of prey in Isaiah to
Marina in the brothel in Pericles, and it reappears in later fictions
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
in which an unusually truculent hero is brought to heel by the
heroine. An ironic parody of the same theme forms the basis of
Aristophanes' Lysistrata.
The fifth phase corresponds to the fifth phase of comedy, and
like it is a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above, in which
the movement of the natural cycle has usually a prominent place.
It deals with a world very similar to that of the second phase except
that the mood is a contemplative withdrawal from or sequel to
action rather than a youthful preparation for it. It is, like the sec-
ond phase, an erotic world, but it presents experience as compre-
hended and not as a mystery. This is the world of most of Morris's
romances, of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, of the mature in-
nocent wisdom of The Franklin's Tale, and of most of the imagery
of the third book of The Faerie Queene. In this last, as well as in
the late Shakespearean romances, notably Pericles, and even The
Tempest, we notice a tendency to the moral stratification of char-
acters. The true lovers are on top of a hierarchy of what might be
called erotic imitations, going down through the various grades of
lust and passion to perversion (Argante and Oliphant in Spenser;
Antiochus and his daughter in Pericles). Such an arrangement of
characters is consistent with the detached and contemplative view
of society taken in this phase.
The sixth or penseroso phase is the last phase of romance as of
comedy. In comedy it shows the comic society breaking up into
small units or individuals; in romance it marks the end of a move-
ment from active to contemplative adventure. A central image of
this phase, a favorite of Yeats, is that of the old man in the tower,
the lonely hermit absorbed in occult or magical studies. On a more
popular and social level it takes in what might be called cuddle fic-
tion: the romance that is physically associated with comfortable
beds or chairs around fireplaces or warm and cosy spots generally.
A characteristic feature of this phase is the tale in quotation marks,
where we have an opening setting with a small group of congenial
people, and then the real story told by one of the members. In The
Turn of the Screw a large party is telling ghost stories in a country
house; then some people leave, and a much smaller and more in-
timate circle gathers around the crucial tale. The opening dis-
missal of catechumens is thoroughly in the spirit and conventions
of this phase. The effect of such devices is to present the story
through a relaxed and contemplative haze as something that enter-
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THEORY OF MYTHS
tains US without, so to speak, confronting us, as direct tragedy con-
fronts us.
Collections of tales based on a symposium device like the De-
cameron belong here. Morris's Earthly Paradise is a very pure ex-
ample of the same phase; there a number of the great archetypal
myths of Greek and Northern culture are personified as a group of
old men who forsook the world during the Middle Ages, refusing
to be made either kings or gods, and who now interchange their
myths in an ineffectual land of dreams. Here the themes of the
lonely old men, the intimate group, and the reported tale are
linked. The calendar arrangement of the tales links it also with the
symbolism of the natural cycle. Another and very concentrated
treatment of the phase is Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts,
where a play representing the history of English life is acted before
a group. The history is conceived not only as a progression but as
a cycle of which the audience is the end, and, as the last page in-
dicates, the beginning as well.
From Wagner's Ring to science fiction, we may notice an increas-
ing popularity of the flood archetype. This usually takes the form
of some cosmic disaster destroying the whole fictional society ex-
cept a small group, which begins life anew in some sheltered spot.
The affinities of this theme to that of the cosy group which has
managed to shut the rest of the world out are clear enough, and it
brings us around again to the image of the mysterious newborn
infant floating on the sea.
One important detail in poetic symbolism remains to be con-
sidered. This is the symbolic presentation of the point at which the
undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature
come into alignment, and which we propose to call the point of
epiphany. Its most common settings are the mountain-top, the
island, the tower, the lighthouse, and the ladder or staircase. Folk
tales and mythologies are full of stories of an original connection
between heaven or the sun and earth. We have ladders of arrows,
ropes pecked in two by mischievous birds, and the like; such stories
are often analogues of the Biblical stories of the Fall, and survive
in Jack's beanstalk, Rapunzel's hair, and even the curious bit of
floating folklore known as the Indian rope trick. The movement
from one world to the other may be symbolized by the golden fire
that descends from the sun, as in the mythical basis of the Danae
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
story, and by its human response, the fire kindled on the sacrificial
altar. The “gold bug’' in Poe's story, which reminds us that the
Eg}^ptian scarab was a solar emblem, is dropped from above on the
end of a string through the eyehole of a skull on a tree and falls on
top of a buried treasure: the archetype here is closely related to the
complex of images we are dealing with, especially to some alchemi-
cal versions of it.
In the Bible we have Jacob's ladder, which in Paradise Lost is
associated with Milton's cosmological diagram of a spherical cos-
mos hanging from heaven with a hole in the top. There are several
mountain-top epiphanies in the Bible, the Transfiguration being
the most notable, and the mountain vision of Pisgah, the end of
the road through the wilderness from which Moses saw the distant
Promised Land, is typologically linked. As long as poets accepted
the Ptolemaic universe, the natural place for the point of epiphany
was a mountain-top just under the moon, the lowest heavenly
body. Purgatory in Dante is an enormous mountain with a path
ascending spirally around it, on top of which, as the pilgrim gradu-
ally recovers his lost innocence and casts off his original sin, is the
garden of Eden. It is at this point that the prodigious apocalyptic
epiphany of the closing cantos of the Purgatorio is achieved. The
sense of being between an apocalyptic world above and a cyclical
world below is present too, as from the garden of Eden all seeds of
vegetable life fall back into the world, while human life passes on.
In The Faerie Queene there is a Pisgah vision in the first book,
when St. George climbs the mountain of contemplation and sees
the heavenly city from a distance. As the dragon he has to kill is
the fallen world, there is a level of the allegory in which his dragon
is the space between himself and the distant city. In the conespond-
ing episode of Ariosto the link between the mountain-top and the
sphere of the moon is clearer. But Spenser's fullest treatment of
the theme is the brilliant metaphysical comedy known as the Mut-
abilitie Cantoes, where the conflict of being and becoming, Jove
and Mutability, order and change, is resolved at the sphere of the
moon. Mutability's evidence consists of the cyclical movements of
nature, but this evidence is turned against her and proved to be a
principle of order in nature instead of mere change. In this poem
the relation of the heavenly bodies to the apocalyptic world is not
metaphorical identification, as it is, at least as a poetic convention,
in Dante's Paradiso, but likeness: they are still within nature, and
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THEORY OF MYTHS
only in the final stanza of the poem does the real apocalyptic world
appear.
The distinction of levels here implies that there may be analo-
gous forms of the point of epiphany. For instance, it may be pre-
sented in erotic terms as a place of sexual fulfilment, where there
is no apocalyptic vision but simply a sense of arriving at the summit
of experience in nature. This natural form of the point of epiphany
is called in Spenser the Gardens of Adonis. It recurs under that
name in Keats's Endymion and is the world entered by the lovers at
the end of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam. The Gardens of Adonis, like
Eden in Dante, are a place of seed, into which everything subject
to the cyclical order of nature enters at death and proceeds from
at birth. Milton’s early poems are, like the Mutahilitie Cantoes,
full of the sense of a distinction between nature as a divinely sanc-
tioned order, the nature of the music of the spheres, and nature
as a fallen and largely chaotic world. The former is symbolized by
the Gardens of Adonis in Comus, from whence the attendant spirit
descends to watch over the Lady. The central image of this arche-
type, Venus watching over Adonis, is (to use a modern distinction)
the analogue in terms of Eros to the Madonna and Son in the
context of Agape.
Milton picks up the theme of the Pisgah vision in Paradise Re-
gained, which assumes an elementary principle of Biblical typology
in which the events of Christ’s life repeat those of the history of
Israel. Israel goes to Egypt, brought down by Joseph, escapes a
slaughter of innocents, is cut off from Egypt by the Red Sea, organ-
izes into twelve tribes, wanders forty years in the wilderness, re-
ceives the law from Sinai, is saved by a brazen serpent on a pole,
crosses the Jordan, and enters the Promised Land under “Joshua,
whom the Gentiles Jesus call.” Jesus goes to Egypt in infancy, led
by Joseph, escapes a slaughter of innocents, is baptized and recog-
nized as the Messiah, wanders forty days in the wilderness, gathers
twelve followers, preaches the Sermon on the Mount, saves man-
kind by dying on a pole, and thereby conquers the Promised Land
as the real Joshua. In Milton the temptation corresponds to the
Pisgah vision of Moses, except that the gaze is turned in the oppo-
site direction. It marks the climax of Jesus’ obedience to the law,
just before his active redemption of the world begins, and the
sequence of temptations consolidates the world, flesh, and devil
into the single form of Satan, The point of epiphany is here rep-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
resented by the pinnacle of the temple, from which Satan falls
away as Jesus remains motionless on top of it. The fall of Satan
reminds us that the point of epiphany is also the top of the wheel
of fortune, the point from which the tragic hero falls. This ironic
use of the point of epiphany occurs in the Bible in the story of the
Tower of Babel.
The Ptolemaic cosmos eventually disappeared, but the point of
epiphany did not, though in more recent literature it is often ironi-
cally reversed, or brought to terms with greater demands for credibil-
ity. Allowing for this, one may still see the same archetype in the
final mountain-top scene of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and
in the central image of Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse. In
the later poetry of Yeats and Eliot it becomes a central unifying
image. Such titles as The Tower and The Winding Stair indicate
its importance for Yeats, and the lunar symbolism and the apoca-
lyptic imagery of The Tower and Sailing to Byzantium are both
thoroughly consistent. In Eliot it is the flame reached in the fire
sermon of The Waste Land, in contrast to the natural cycle which
is symbolized by water, and it is also the ''multifoliate rose" of
The Hollow Men. Ash Wednesday brings us back again to the
purgatorial winding stair, and Little Gidding to the burning rose,
where there is a descending movement of fire symbolized by the
Pentecostal tongues of flame and an ascending one symbolized by
Hercules' pyre and ''shirt of flame."
THE MYTHOS OF AUTUMN: TRAGEDY
Thanks as usual to Aristotle, the theory of tragedy is in con-
siderably better shape than the other three mythoi, and we can
deal with it more briefly, as the ground is more familiar. Without
tragedy, all literary fictions might be plausibly explained as expres-
sions of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of
repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested
quality in literary experience. It is largely through the tragedies of
Greek culture that the sense of the authentic natural basis of hu-
man character comes into literature. In romance the characters are
still largely dream-characters; in satire they tend to be caricatures;
in comedy their actions are twisted to fit the demands of a happy
ending. In full tragedy the main characters are emancipated from
dream, an emancipation which is at the same time a restriction,
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THEORY OF MYTHS
because the order of nature is present. However thickly strewn a
tragedy may be with ghosts, portents, witches, or oracles, we know
that the tragic hero cannot simply rub a lamp and summon a genie
to get him out of his trouble.
Like comedy, tragedy is best and most easily studied in drama,
but it is not confined to drama, nor to actions that end in disaster.
Plays that are usually called or classified with tragedies end in
serenity, like Cymbeline, or even joy, like Alcestis or Racine's
Esther, or in an ambiguous mood that is hard to define, like Phu
loctetes. On the other hand, while a predominantly sombre mood
forms part of the unity of the tragic structure, concentrating on
mood does not intensify the tragic effect: if it did, Titus Andronicus
might well be the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies. The
source of tragic effect must be sought, as Aristotle pointed out, in
the tragic mythos or plot-structure.
It is a commonplace of criticism that comedy tends to deal with
characters in a social group, whereas tragedy is more concentrated
on a single individual. We have given reasons in the first essay for
thinking that the typical tragic hero is somewhere between the di-
vine and the ''all too human." This must be true even of dying gods:
Prometheus, being a god, cannot die, but he suffers for his sympathy
with the "dying ones" [hrotoi) or "mortal" men, and even suffer-
ing has something subdivine about it. The tragic hero is very great
as compared with us, but there is something else, something on
the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is
small. This something else may be called God, gods, fate, accident,
fortune, necessity, circumstance, or any combination of these, but
whatever it is the tragic hero is our mediator with it.
The tragic hero is typically on top of the wheel of fortune, half-
way between human society on the ground and the something
greater in the sky. Prometheus, Adam, and Christ hang between
heaven and earth, between a world of paradisal freedom and a world
of bondage. Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their
human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the
power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning
than a clump of grass. Conductors may of course be instruments
as well as victims of the divine lightning: Milton's Samson destroys
the Philistine temple with himself, and Hamlet nearly exterminates
the Danish court in his own fall. Something of Nietzsche's moun-
tain-top air of transvaluation clings to the tragic hero: his thoughts
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
are not ours any more than his deeds, even if, like Faustus, he is
dragged off to hell for having them. Whatever eloquence or affabil-
ity he may have, an inscrutable reserve lies behind it. Even sinister
heroes— Tamburlaine, Macbeth, Creon— retain this reserve, and we
are reminded that men will die loyally for a wicked or cruel man,
but not for an amiable backslapper. Those who attract most devo-
tion from others are those who are best able to suggest in their
manner that they have no need of it, and from the urbanity of
Hamlet to the sullen ferocity of Ajax, tragic heroes are wrapped in
the mystery of their communion with that something beyond which
we can see only through them, and which is the source of their
strength and their fate alike. In the phrase which so fascinated
Yeats, the tragic hero leaves his servants to do his ''living'’ for him,
and the center of tragedy is in the hero's isolation, not in a villain's
betrayal, even when the villain is, as he often is, a part of the hero
himself.
As for the something beyond, its names are variable but the form
in which it manifests itseljf is fairly constant. Whether the context
is Greek, Christian, or undefined, tragedy seems to lead up to an
epiphany of law, of that which is and must be. It can hardly be an
accident that the two great developments of tragic drama, in fifth-
century Athens and in seventeenth-century Europe, were con-
temporary with the rise of Ionian and of Renaissance science. In
such a world-view nature is seen as an impersonal process which
human law imitates as best it can, and this direct relation of man
and natural law is in the foreground. The sense in Greek tragedy
that fate is stronger than the gods really implies that the gods exist
primarily to ratify the order of nature, and that if any personality,
even a divine one, possesses a genuine power of veto over law, it is
most unlikely that he will want to exercise it. In Christianity much
the same is true of the personality of Christ in relation to the in-
scrutable decrees of the Father. Similarly the tragic process in
Shakespeare is natural in the sense that it simply happens, what-
ever its cause, explanation, or relationships. Characters may grope
about for conceptions of gods that kill us for their sport, or for a
divinity that shapes our ends, but the action of tragedy will not
abide our questions, a fact often transferred to the personality of
Shakespeare.
In its most elementary form, the vision of law {dike) operates as
lex talionis or revenge. The hero provokes enmity, or inherits a
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THEORY OF MYTHS
situation of enmity, and the return of the avenger constitutes the
catastrophe. The revenge-tragedy is a simple tragic structure, and
like most simple structures can be a very powerful one, often re-
tained as a central theme even in the most complex tragedies. Here
the original act provoking the revenge sets up an antithetical or
counterbalancing movement, and the completion of the movement
resolves the tragedy. This happens so often that we may almost char-
acterize the total mythos of tragedy as binary, in contrast to the
three-part saturnalia movement of comedy.
We notice however the frequency of the device of making the
revenge come from another world, through gods or ghosts or oracles.
This device expands the conceptions of both nature and law beyond
the limits of the obvious and tangible. It does not thereby transcend
those conceptions, as it is still natural law that is manifested by the
tragic action. Here we see the tragic hero as disturbing a balance
in nature, nature being conceived as an order stretching over the
two kingdoms of the visible and the invisible, a balance which
sooner or later must right itself. The righting of the balance is what
the Greeks called nemesis: again, the agent or instrument of neme-
sis may be human vengeance, ghostly vengeance, divine vengeance,
divine justice, accident, fate or the logic of events, but the essential
thing is that nemesis happens, and happens impersonally, unaf-
fected, as Oedipus Tyr annus illustrates, by the moral quality of hu-
man motivation involved. In the Oresteia we are led from a series
of revenge-movements into a final vision of natural law, a universal
compact in which moral law is included and which the gods, in the
person of the goddess of wisdom, endorse. Here nemesis^ like its
counterpart the Mosaic law in Christianity, is not abolished but ful-
filled: it is developed from a mechanical or arbitrary sense of re-
stored order, represented by the Furies, to the rational sense of it
expounded by Athene. The appearance of Athene does not turn the
Oresteia into a comedy, but clarifies its tragic vision.
There are two reductive formulas which have often been used to
explain tragedy. Neither is quite good enough, but each is almost
good enough, and as they are contradictory, they must represent ex-
treme or limiting views of tragedy. One of these is the theory that
all tragedy exhibits the omnipotence of an external fate. And, of
course, the overwhelming majority of tragedies do leave us with a
sense of the supremacy of impersonal power and of the limitation
of human efiFort. But the fatalistic reduction of tragedy confuses the
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
tragic condition with the tragic process: fate, in a tragedy, normally
becomes external to the hero only after the tragic process has been
set going. The Greet ananke or moira is in its normal, or pre-tragic,
form the internal balancing condition of life. It appears as external
or antithetical necessity only after it has been violated as a condi-
tion of life, just as justice is the internal condition of an honest man,
but the external antagonist of the criminal. Homer uses a profoundly
significant phrase for the theory of tragedy when he has Zeus speak
of Aegisthus as going hyper moron, beyond fate.
The fatalistic reduction of tragedy does not distinguish tragedy
from irony, and it is again significant that we speak of the irony of
fate rather than of its tragedy. Irony does not need an exceptional
central figure: as a rule, the dingier the hero the sharper the irony,
when irony alone is aimed at. It is the admixture of heroism that
gives tragedy its characteristic splendor and exhilaration. The tragic
hero has normally had an extraordinary, often a nearly divine, des-
tiny almost within his grasp, and the glory of that original vision
never quite fades out of tragedy. The rhetoric of tragedy requires
the noblest diction that the greatest poets can produce, and while
catastrophe is the normal end of tragedy, this is balanced by an
equally significant original greatness, a paradise lost.
The other reductive theory of tragedy is that the act which sets
the tragic process going must be primarily a violation of moral law,
whether human or divine; in slaort, that Aristotle's hamartia or
“flaw" must have an essential connection with sin or wrongdoing.
Again it is true that the great majority of tragic heroes do possess
hybris, a proud, passionate, obsessed or soaring mind which brings
about a morally intelligible downfall. Such hybris is the normal
precipitating agent of catastrophe, just as in comedy the cause of
the happy ending is usually some act of humility, represented by a
slave or by a heroine meanly disguised. In Aristotle the hamartia of
the tragic hero is associated with Aristotle's ethical conception of
pToairesis, or free choice of an end, and Aristotle certainly does tend
to think of tragedy as morally, almost physically, intelligible. It has
already been suggested, however, that the conception of catharsis,
which is central to Aristotle's view of tragedy, is inconsistent with
moral reductions of it. Pity and terror are moral feelings, and they
are relevant but not attached to the tragic situation. Shakespeare is
particularly fond of planting moral lightning-rods on both sides of
his heroes to deflect the pity and terror: we have mentioned Othello
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THEORY OF MYTHS
flanked by lago and Desdemona, but Hamlet is flanked by Claudius
and Ophelia, Lear by his daughters, and even Macbeth by Lady
Macbeth and Duncan. In all these tragedies there is a sense of some
far-reaching mystery of which this morally intelligible process is
only a part. The hero's act has thrown a switch in a larger machine
than his own life, or even his ovm society.
All theories of tragedy as morally explicable sooner or later run
into the question: is an innocent sufferer in tragedy (i.e., poetically
innocent), Iphigeneia, Cordelia, Socrates in Plato's Apology, Christ
in the Passion, not a tragic figure? It is not very convincing to try
to provide crucial moral flaws for such characters. Cordelia shows
a high spirit, perhaps a touch of wilfulness, in refusing to flatter
her father, and Cordelia gets hanged. Joan of Arc in Schiller has
a moment of tenderness for an English soldier, and Joan is burned
alive, or would have been if Schiller had not decided to sacrifice the
facts to save the face of his moral theory. Here we are getting away
from tragedy, and close to a kind of insane cautionary tale, like
Mrs. Pipchin's little boy who was gored to death by a bull for
asking inconvenient questions. Tragedy, in short, seems to elude
the antithesis of moral responsibility and arbitrary fate, just as it
eludes the antithesis of good and evil.
In the third book of Paradise Lost, Milton represents God as
arguing that he made man ^'Sufficient to have stood, though free
to fall." God knew that Adam would fall, but did not compel him
to do so, and on that basis he disclaims legal responsibility. This
argument is so bad that Milton, if he was trying to escape refuta-
tion, did well to ascribe it to God. Thought and act cannot be so
separated: if God had foreknowledge he must have known in the
instant of creating Adam that he was creating a being who would
fall. Yet the passage is a most haunting and suggestive one nonethe-
less. For Paradise Lost is not simply an attempt to write one more
tragedy, but to expound what Milton believed to be the archetypal
myth of tragedy. Hence the passage is another example of existential
projection: the real basis of the relation of Milton's God to Adam
is the relation of the tragic poet to his hero. The tragic poet knows
that his hero will be in a tragic situation, but he exerts all his power
to avoid the sense of having manipulated that situation for his own
purposes. He exhibits his hero to us as God exhibits Adam to the
angels. If the hero was not sufficient to have stood, the mode is
purely ironic; if he was not free to fall, the mode is purely romantic,
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the story of an invincible hero who will conquer all his antagonists
as long as the story is about him. Now most theories of tragedy take
one great tragedy as their norm: thus Aristotle's theory is largely
founded on Oedipus Tyrannus, and Hegel's on Antigone. In seeing
the archetypal human tragedy in the story of Adam, Milton was,
of course, in agreement with the whole Judaeo-Christian cultural
tradition, and perhaps arguments drawn from the story of Adam
may have better luck in literary criticism than in subjects compelled
to assume Adam's real existence, either as fact or as a merely legal
fiction. Chaucer's monk, who clearly understood what he was do-
ing, began with Lucifer and Adam, and we may be well advised
to follow his example.
Adam, then, is in a heroic human situation: he is on top of the
wheel of fortune, with the destiny of the gods almost within his
reach. He forfeits that destiny in a way which suggests moral re-
sponsibility to some and a conspiracy of fate to others. What he
does is to exchange a fortune of unlimited freedom for the fate
involved in the consequences of the act of exchange, just as, for a
man who deliberately jumps off a precipice, the law of gravitation
acts as fate for the brief remainder of his life. The exchange is
presented by Milton as itself a free act or proairesiSj a use of freedom
to lose freedom. And just as comedy often sets up an arbitrary law
and then organizes the action- to break or evade it, so tragedy pre-
sents the reverse theme of narrowing a comparatively free life into
a process of causation. This happens to Macbeth when he accepts
the logic of usurpation, to Hamlet when he accepts the logic of
revenge, to Lear when he accepts the logic of abdication. The dis-
covery or anagnorisis which comes at the end of the tragic plot is
not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him
—Oedipus Tyrannus, despite its reputation as a typical tragedy, is
rather a special case in that regard—but the recognition of the de-
termined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an im-
plicit comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken.
The line of Milton dealing with the fall of the devils, ''O how
unlike the place from whence they fell!", referring as it does both
to Virgil's quantum mutatus ab illo and Isaiah's ''How art thou
fallen from heaven, O Lucifer son of the morning," combines the
Classical and the Christian archetypes of tragedy— for Satan, of
course, like Adam, possessed an original glory. In Milton the com-
plement to the vision of Adam on top of the wheel of fortune and
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THEORY OF MYTHS
falling into the world of the wheel is Christ standing on the pin-
nacle of the temple, urged by Satan to fall, and remaining motion-
less.
As soon as Adam falls, he enters his own created life, which is
also the order of nature as we know it. The tragedy of Adam, there-
fore, resolves, like all other tragedies, in the manifestation of nat-
ural law. He enters a world in which existence is itself tragic, not
existence modified by an act, deliberate or unconscious. Merely to
exist is to disturb the balance of nature. Every natural man is a
Hegelian thesis, and implies a reaction: every new birth provokes
the return of an avenging death. This fact, in itself ironic and now
called Angst, becomes tragic when a sense of a lost and originally
higher destiny is added to it. Aristotle's hamartia, then, is a con-
dition of being, not a cause of becoming: the reason why Milton
ascribes his dubious argument to God is that he is so anxious to
remove God from a predetermined causal sequence. On one side
of the tragic hero is an opportunity for freedom, on the other the
inevitable consequence of losing that freedom. These two sides of
Adam’s situation are represented in Milton by the speeches of
Raphael and Michael respectively. Even with an innocent hero or
martyr the same situation arises: in the Passion story it occurs in
Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane. Tragedy seems to move up to an
Augenblick or crucial moment from which point the road to what
might have been and the road to what will be can be simultaneously
seen. Seen by the audience, that is: it cannot be seen by the hero
if he is in a state of hybris, for in that case the crucial moment is
for him a moment of dizziness, when the wheel of fortune begins
its inevitable cyclical movement downward.
In Adam’s situation there is a feeling, which in Christian tradi-
tion can be traced back at least to St. Augustine, that time begins
with the fall; that the fall from liberty into the natural cycle also
started the movement of time as we know it. In other tragedies
too we can trace the feeling that nemesis is deeply involved with
the movement of time, whether as the missing of a tide in the af-
fairs of men, as a recognition that the time is out of joint, as a
sense that time is the devourer of life, the mouth of hell at the
previous moment, when the potential passes forever into the actual,
or, in its ultimate horror, Macbeth’s sense of it as simply one clock-
tick after another. In comedy time plays a redeeming role: it un-
covers and brings to light what is essential to the happy ending.
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
The subtitle of Greene's Pandosto, the source of The Winter’s
Tale, is "'The Triumph of Time,” and it well describes the nature
of Shakespeare's action, where time is introduced as a chorus. But
in tragedy the cognitio is normally the recognition of the inevitabil-
ity of a causal sequence in time, and the forebodings and ironic
anticipations surrounding it are based on a sense of cyclical return.
In irony, as distinct from tragedy, the wheel of time completely
encloses the action, and there is no sense of an original contact
with a relatively timeless world. In the Bible the tragic fall of Adam
is followed by its historical repetition, the fall of Israel into Egyp-
tian bondage, which is, so to speak, its ironic confirmation. As long
as the Geoffrey version of British history was accepted, the fall of
Troy was the corresponding event in the history of Britain, and,
as the fall of Troy began with an idolatrous misapplication of an
apple, there were even symbolic parallels. Shakespeare's most ironic
play, Troilus and Cressida, presents in Ulysses the voice of worldly
wisdom, expounding with great eloquence the two primary cate-
gories of the perspective of tragic irony in the fallen world, time
and the hierarchic chain of being. The extraordinary treatment of
the tragic vision of time by Nietzsche's Zarathustra, in which the
heroic acceptance of cyclical return becomes a glumly cheerful ac-
ceptance of a cosmology of identical recurrence, marks the influ-
ence of an age of irony.
Anyone accustomed to think archetypally of literature will recog-
nize in tragedy a mimesis of sacrifice. Tragedy is a paradoxical com-
bination of a fearful sense of rightness (the hero must fall) and a
pitying sense of wrongness (it is too bad that he falls). There is a
similar paradox in the two elements of sacrifice. One of these is
communion, the dividing of a heroic or divine body among a group
which brings them into unity with, and as, that body. The other
is propitiation, the sense that in spite of the communion the body
really belongs to another, a greater, and a potentially wrathful
power. The ritual analogies to tragedy are more obvious than the
psychological ones, for it is irony, not tragedy, that represents the
nightmare or anxiety-dream. But, just as the literary critic finds
Freud most suggestive for the theory of comedy, and Jung for the
theory of romance, so for the theory of tragedy one naturally looks
to the psychology of the will to power, as expounded in Adler and
Nietzsche. Here one finds a '‘Dionysiac" aggressive will, intoxi-
cated by dreams of its own omnipotence, impinging upon an “Apol-
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THEORY OF MYTHS
Ionian” sense of external and immovable order. As a mimesis of
ritual, the tragic hero is not really hilled or eaten, but the corre-
sponding thing in art still takes place, a vision of death which draws
the survivors into a new unity. As a mimesis of dream, the in-
scrutable tragic hero, like the proud and silent swan, becomes
articulate at the point of death, and the audience, like the poet
in Kubla Khan, revives his song within itself. With his fall, a
greater world beyond which his gigantic spirit had blocked out
becomes for an instant visible, but there is also a sense of the mys-
tery and remoteness of that world.
If we are right in our suggestion that romance, tragedy, irony
and comedy are all episodes in a total quest-myth, we can see how
it is that comedy can contain a potential tragedy within itself. In
myth, the hero is a god, and hence he does not die, but dies and
rises again. The ritual pattern behind the catharsis of comedy is the
resurrection that follows the death, the epiphany or manifestation
of the risen hero. In Aristophanes the hero, who often goes through
a point of ritual death, is treated as a risen god, hailed as a new
Zeus, or given the quasi-divine honors of the Olympic victor. In
New Comedy the new human body is both a hero and a social
group. The Aeschylean trilogy proceeds to the comic satyr-play,
which is said to have afHnities with spring festivals. Christianity,
too, sees tragedy as an episode in the divine comedy, the larger
scheme of redemption and resurrection. The sense of tragedy as a
prelude to comedy seems almost inseparable from anything ex-
plicitly Christian. The serenity of the final double chorus in the
St. Matthew Passion would hardly be attainable if composer and
audience did not know that there was more to the story. Nor would
the death of Samson lead to “calm of mind, all passion spent,” if
Samson were not a prototype of the rising Christ, associated at the
appropriate moment with the phoenix.
This is an example of the way in which myths explain the struc-
tural principles behind familiar literary facts, in this case the fact
that to make a sombre action end happily is easy enough, and to
reverse the procedure almost impossible. (Of course we have a nat-
ural dislike of seeing pleasant situations turn out disastrously, but
if a poet is working on a solid structural basis, our natural likes and
dislikes have nothing to do with the matter.) Even Shakespeare,
who can do anything, never does quite this. The action of King
Lear, which seems heading for some kind of serenity, is suddenly
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
wrenched into agony by the hanging of Cordelia, providing a con-
clusion which the stage refused to act for over a century, but none
of Shakespeare's tragedies impresses us as a comedy gone wrong—
Romeo and Juliet has a suggestion of such a structure, but it is
only a suggestion. Hence while of course a tragedy may contain a
comic action, it contains it only episodically as a subordinate con-
trast or underplot.
The characterization of tragedy is very like that of comedy in
reverse. The source of nemesis, whatever it is, is an eiron, and may
appear in a great variety of agents, from wrathful gods to hypo-
critical villains. In comedy we noticed three main types of eiron
characters: a benevolent withdrawing and returning figure, the
tricky slave or vice, and the hero and heroine. We have the tragic
counterpart to the withdrawn eiron in the god who decrees the
tragic action, like Athene in Ajax or Aphrodite in Hippolytus; a
Christian example is God the Father in Paradise Lost. He may also
be a ghost, like Hamlet's father; or it may not be a person at all
but simply an invisible force known only by its effects, like the
death that quietly seizes on Tamburlaine when the time has come
for him to die. Often, as in the revenge-tragedy, it is an event previ-
ous to the action of which the tragedy itself is the consequence.
A tragic counterpart to the vice or tricky slave may be discerned
in the soothsayer or prophet who foresees the inevitable end, or
more of it than the hero does, like Teiresias. A closer example is
the Machiavellian villain of Elizabethan drama, who, like the vice
in comedy, is a convenient catalyzer of the action because he re-
quires the minimum of motivation, being a self-starting principle
of malevolence. Like the comic vice, too, he is something of an
architectus or projection of the author's will, in this case for a tragic
conclusion. '1 limned this night-piece," says Webster's Lodovico,
'"and it was my best." lago dominates the action of Othello almost
to the point of being a tragic counterpart to the black king or evil
magician of romance. The affinities of the Machiavellian villain
with the diabolical are naturally close, and he may be an actual
devil like Mephistopheles, but the sense of awfulness belonging to
an agent of catastrophe can also make him something more like
the high priest of a sacrifice. There is a touch of this in Webster's
Bosola. King Lear has a Machiavellian villain in Edmund, and Ed-
mund is contrasted with Edgar. Edgar, with his bewildering variety
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THEORY OF MYTHS
of disguises, his appearance to blind or mad people in different
roles, and his tendency to appear on the third sound of the trumpet
and to come pat like the catastrophe of the old comedy, seems to
be an experiment in a new type, a kind of tragic “virtue,” if I may
coin this word by analogy, a counterpart in the order of nature to
a guardian angel or similar attendant in romance.
The tragic hero usually belongs of course to the alazon group, an
impostor in the sense that he is self-deceived or made dizzy by
hybris. In many tragedies he begins as a semi-divine figure, at least
in his own eyes, and then an inexorable dialectic sets to work which
separates the divine pretence from the human actuality. ‘They
told me I was everything,” says Lear: “ 'tis a lie; I am not ague-
proof.” The tragic hero is usually vested with supreme authority,
but is often in the more ambiguous position of a tyrannos whose
rule depends on his own abilities, rather than a purely hereditary
or de jure monarch (basileus) like Duncan. The latter is more di-
rectly a symbol of the original vision or birthright, and is often a
somewhat pathetic victim, like Richard II, or even Agamemnon.
Parental figures in tragedy have the same ambivalence that they
have in all other forms.
We found in comedy that the term bomolochos or buffoon need
not be restricted to farce, but could be extended to cover comic
characters who are primarily entertainers, with the function of in-
creasing or focussing the comic mood. The corresponding contrast-
ing type in tragedy is the suppliant, the character, often female,
who presents a picture of unmitigated helplessness and destitution.
Such a figure is pathetic, and pathos, though it seems a gentler and
more relaxed mood than tragedy, is even more terrifying. Its basis
is the exclusion of an individual from a group, hence it attacks
the deepest fear in ourselves that we possess— a fear much deeper
than the relatively cosy and sociable bogey of hell. In the figure of
the suppliant pity and terror are brought to the highest possible
pitch of intensity, and the awful consequences of rejecting the sup-
pliant for all concerned is a central theme of Greek tragedy. Sup-
pliant figures are often women threatened with death or rape, or
children, like Prince Arthur in King John, The fragility of Shake-
speare's Ophelia marks an affinity with the suppliant type. Often,
too, the suppliant is in the structurally tragic position of having
lost a place of greatness: this is the position of Adam and Eve in
the tenth book of Paradise Lost, of the Trojan women after the fall
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
of Troy, of Oedipus in the Colonus play, and so on. A subordinate
figure who plays the role of focussing the tragic mood is the mes-
senger who regularly announces the catastrophe in Greek tragedy.
In the final scene of comedy, when the author is usually trying to
get all his characters on the stage at once, we often notice the intro-
duction of a new character, generally a messenger bearing some
missing piece of the cognitiOy such as Jaques de Boys in As You
Like It or the gentle astringer in AlVs Well, who represents the
comic counterpart.
Finally, a tragic counterpart of the comic refuser of festivity may
be discerned in a tragic type of plain dealer who may be simply the
faithful friend of the hero, like Horatio in Hamlet, but is often
an outspoken critic of the tragic action, like Kent in King Lear or
Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra. Such a character is in the posi-
tion of refusing, or at any rate resisting, the tragic movement to-
ward catastrophe. AbdieFs role in the tragedy of Satan in Paradise
Lost is similar. The familiar figures of Cassandra and Teiresias com-
bine this role with that of the soothsayer. Such figures, when they
occur in a tragedy without a chorus, are often called chorus char-
acters, as they illustrate one of the essential functions of the tragic
chorus. In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy
the chorus, however faithful, usually represents the society from
which the hero is gradually isolated. Hence what it expresses is a
social norm against which the hero's hybris may be measured. The
chorus is not the voice of the hero's conscience by any means, but
very seldom does it encourage him in his hybris or prompt him to
disastrous action. The chorus or chorus character is, so to speak,
the embryonic germ of comedy in tragedy, just as the refuser of
festivity, the melancholy Jaques or Alceste, is a tragic germ in
comedy.
In comedy the erotic and social affinities of the hero are com-
bined and unified in the final scene; tragedy usually makes love
and the social structure irreconcilable and contending forces, a
conflict which reduces love to passion and social activity to a for-
bidding and imperative duty. Comedy is much concerned with
integrating the family and adjusting the family to society as a
whole; tragedy is much concerned with breaking up the family and
opposing it to the rest of society. This gives us the tragic archetype
of Antigone, of which the conflict of love and honor in Classical
French drama, of Neigung and Pfiicht in Schiller, of passion and
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THEORY OF MYTHS
authority in the Jacobeans, are all moralized simplifications. Again^.
just as the heroine of comedy often ties together the action, so it is
obvious that the central female figure of a tragic action will often
polarize the tragic conflict. Eve, Helen, Gertrude, and Emily in the
Knight's Tale are some ready instances: the structural role of Bri-
seis in the Iliad is similar. Comedy works out the proper relations
of its characters and prevents heroes from marrying their sisters or
mothers; tragedy presents the disaster of Oedipus or the incest of
Siegmund. Tliere is a great deal in tragedy about pride of race and
birthright, but its general tendency is to isolate a ruling or noble
family from the rest of society.
The phases of tragedy move from the heroic to the ironic, the
first three corresponding to the first three phases of romance, the
last three to the last three of irony. The first phase of tragedy is the
one in which the central character is given the greatest possible
dignity in contrast to the other characters, so that we get the per-
spective of a stag pulled down by wolves. The sources of dignity
are courage and innocence, and in this phase the hero or heroine
usually is innocent. This phase corresponds to the myth of the
birth of the hero in romance, a theme which is occasionally incor-
porated into a tragic structure, as in Racine's Athalie. But owing
to the unusual difficulty of making an interesting dramatic character
out of an infant, the central and typical figure of this phase is the
calumniated woman, often a mother the legitimacy of whose child
is suspected. A whole series of tragedies based on a Griselda figure
belong here, stretching from the Senecan Octavia to Hardy's Tess,
and including the tragedy of Hermione in The Winter's Tale. If
we are to read Alcestis as a tragedy, we have to see it as a tragedy of
this phase in which Alcestis is violated by Death and then has her
fidelity vindicated by being restored to life. Cymbeline belongs here
too: in this play the theme of the birth of the hero appears offstage,
for Cymbeline was the king of Britain at the time of the birth of
Christ, and the halcyon peace in which the play concludes has a
suppressed reference to this.
An even clearer example, and certainly one of the greatest in
English literature, is The Duchess of Malfi. The Duchess has the
innocence of abundant life in a sick and melancholy society, where
the fact that she has "*youth and a little beauty" is precisely why
she is hated. She reminds us too that one of the essential character-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
istics of innocence in the martyr is an unwillingness to die. When
Bosola comes to murder her he makes elaborate attempts to put
her half in love with easeful death and to suggest that death is
really a deliverance. The attempt is motivated by a grimly con-
trolled pity, and is roughly the equivalent of the vinegar sponge in
the Passion. When the Duchess, her back to the wall, says am
the Duchess of Malfi still,^' ''stilF' having its full weight of ‘^always,''
we understand how it is that even after her death her invisible
presence continues to be the most vital character in the play. The
White Devil is an ironic parody-treatment of the same phase.
The second phase corresponds to the youth of the romantic hero,
and is in one way or another the tragedy of innocence in the sense
of inexperience, usually involving young people. It may be simply
the tragedy of a youthful life cut off, as in the stories of Iphigeneia
and Jephthah^s daughter, of Romeo and Juliet, or, in a more com-
plex situation, in the bewildered mixture of idealism and priggish-
ness that brings Hippolytus to disaster. The simplicity of Shaw's
Joan and her lack of worldly wisdom place her here also. For us
however the phase is dominated by the archetypal tragedy of the
green and golden world, the loss of the innocence of Adam and
Eve, who, no matter how heavy a doctrinal load they have to carry,
will always remain dramatically in the position of children baffled
by their first contact with an adult situation. In many tragedies of
this type the central character survives, so that the action closes
with some adjustment to a new and more mature experience.
‘‘Henceforth I learn that to obey is best," says Adam, as he and
Eve go hand in hand out to the world before them. A less clear
cut but similar resolution occurs when Philoctetes, whose serpent-
wound reminds us a little of Adam, is taken off his island to enter
the Trojan war. Ibsen's Little Eyolf is a tragedy of this phase, and
with the same continuing conclusion, in which it is the older char-
acters who are educated through the death of a child.
The third phase, corresponding to the central quest-theme of
romance, is tragedy in which a strong emphasis is thrown on the
success or completeness of the hero's achievement. The Passion
belongs here, as do all tragedies in which the hero is in any way
related to or a prototype of Christ, like Samson Agonistes. The
paradox of victory within tragedy may be expressed by a double
perspective in the action. Samson is a buffoon of a Philistine carni-
val and simultaneously a tragic hero to the Israelites, but the trag-
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THEORY OF MYTHS
edy ends in triumph and the carnival in catastrophe. Much the
same is true of the mocked Christ in the Passion. But just as the
second phase often ends in anticipation of greater maturity, so this
one is often a sequel to a previous tragic or heroic action, and comes
at the end of a heroic life. One of the greatest dramatic examples
is Oedipus at Colonus, where we find the usual binary form of a
tragedy conditioned by a previous tragic act, ending this time not
in a second disaster, but in a full rich serenity that goes far beyond
a mere resignation to Fate. In narrative literature we may cite
Beowulf's last fight with the dragon, the pendant to his Grendel
quest. Shakespeare's Henry V is a successfully completed romantic
quest made tragic by its implicit context: everybody knows that
King Henry died almost immediately and that sixty years of un-
broken disaster followed for England— at least, if anyone in Shake-
speare's audience did not know that, his ignorance was certainly
no fault of Shakespeare's.
The fourth phase is the typical fall of the hero through hybris
and hamartia that we have already discussed. In this phase we cross
the boundary line from innocence to experience, which is also the
direction in which the hero falls. In the fifth phase the ironic ele-
ment increases, the heroic decreases, and the characters look further
away and in a smaller perspective. Timon of Athens impresses us
as more ironic and less heroic than the better known tragedies, not
simply because Timon is a more middle-class hero who has to buy
what authority he has, but because the feeling that Timon's suicide
has somehow failed to make a fully heroic point is very strong.
Timon is oddly isolated from the final action, in which the breach
between Alcibiades and the Athenians closes up over his head, in
striking contrast with the conclusions of most of the other trage-
dies, where nobody is allowed to steal the show from the central
character.
The ironic perspective in tragedy is attained by putting the char-
acters in a state of lower freedom than the audience. For a Christian
audience an Old Testament or pagan setting is ironic in this sense,
as it shows its characters moving according to the conditions of a
law, whether Jewish or natural, from which the audience has been,
at least theoretically, redeemed. Samson Agonistes, though unique
in English literature, presents a combination of Classical form
and Hebrew subject-matter that the greatest contemporary trage-
dian, Racine, also reached at the end of his life in Athalie and
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
Esther. Similarly the epilogue to Chaucer's Troilus puts a Courtly
Love tragedy into its historical relation to ''payens corsed olde rites."
The events in Geoffrey of Monmouth's British history are supposed
to he contemporary with those of the Old Testament, and the sense
of life under the law is present everywhere in King Lear. The same
structural principle accounts for the use of astrology and other
fatalistic machinery connected with the turning wheels of fate or
fortune, Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed, and Troilus loses Cri-
seyde because every five hundred years Jupiter and Saturn meet
the crescent moon in Cancer and claim another victim. The tragic
action of the fifth phase presents for the most part the tragedy of
lost direction and lack of knowledge, not unlike the second phase
except that the context is the world of adult experience. Oedipus
Tyrannus belongs here, and all tragedies and tragic episodes which
suggest the existential projection of fatalism, and, like much of the
Book of Job, seem to raise metaphysical or theological questions
rather than social or moral ones.
Oedipus Tyrannus, however, is already moving into the sixth
phase of tragedy, a world of shock and horror in which the central
images are images of sparagmos, that is, cannibalism, mutilation,
and torture. The specific reaction known as shock is appropriate to
a situation of cruelty or outrage. (The secondary or false shock
produced by the outrage done to some emotional attachment or
fixation, as in the critical reception of ]ude the Obscure or Ulysses,
has no status in criticism, as false shock is a disguised resistance to
the autonomy of culture.) Any tragedy may have one or more
shocking scenes in it, but sixth-phase tragedy shocks as a whole, in
its total effect. This phase is more common as a subordinate aspect
of tragedy than as its main theme, as unqualified horror or despair
makes a difficult cadence. Prometheus Bound is a tragedy of this
phase, though this is partly an illusion due to its isolation from the
trilogy to which it belongs. In such tragedies the hero is in too
great agony or humiliation to gain the privilege of a heroic pose,
hence it is usually easier to make him a villainous hero, like Mar-
lowe's Barabas, although Faustus also belongs to the same phase.
Seneca is fond of this phase, and bequeathed to the Elizabethans
an interest in the gruesome, an effect which usually has some con-
nection with mutilation, as when Ferdinand offers to shake hands
with the Duchess of Malfi and gives her a dead man's hand. Titus
Andronicus is an experiment in Senecan sixth-phase horror which
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THEORY OF MYTHS
makes a great deal of mutilation, and shows also a strong interest,
from the opening scene on, in the sacrificial symbolism of tragedy.
At the end of this phase we reach a point of demonic epiphany,
where we see or glimpse the undisplaced demonic vision, the vision
of the Inferno. Its chief symbols, besides the prison and the mad-
house, are the instruments of a torturing death, the cross under the
sunset being the antithesis of the tower under the moon. A strong
element of demonic ritual in public punishments and similar mob
amusements is exploited by tragic and ironic myth. Breaking on
the wheel becomes Lear’s wheel of fire; bear-baiting is an image for
Gloucester and Macbeth, and for the crucified Prometheus the
humiliation of exposure, the horror of being watched, is a greater
misery than the pain, Derkou theama {behold the spectacle; get
your staring over with ) is his bitterest cry. The inability of Milton’s
blind Samson to stare back is his greatest torment, and one which
forces him to scream at Delilah, in one of the most terrible passages
of all tragic drama, that he will tear her to pieces if she touches him.
THE MYTHOS OF WINTER: IRONY AND SATIRE
We come now to the mythical patterns of experience, the at-
tempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities
of unidealized existence We cannot find these patterns merely in
the mimetic or representational aspect of such literature, for that
aspect is one of content and not form. As structure, the central
principle of ironic myth is best approached as a parody of romance:
the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic con-
tent which fits them in unexpected ways. No one in a romance,
Don Quixote protests, ever asks who pays for the hero’s accommo-
dation.
The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is
militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes
standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured.
Sheer invective or name-calling ("'flyting”) is satire in which there
is relatively little irony: on the other hand, whenever a reader is
not sure what the author’s attitude is or what his own is supposed
to be, we have irony with relatively little satire. Fielding’s Jonathan
Wild is satiric irony: certain flat moral judgements made by the
narrator (as in the description of Bagshot in chapter twelve) are in
accord with the decorum of the work, but would be out of key in.
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
say, Madame Bovary. Irony is consistent both with complete real-
ism of content and with the suppression of attitude on the part of
the author. Satire demands at least a token fantasy, a content which
the reader recognizes as grotesque, and at least an implicit moral
standard, the latter being essential in a militant attitude to ex-
perience. Some phenomena, such as the ravages of disease, may be
called grotesque, but to make fun of them would not be very effec-
tive satire. The satirist has to select his absurdities, and the act of
selection is a moral act.
The argument of Swift's Modest Proposal has a brain-softening
plausibility about it: one is almost led to feel that the narrator is
not only reasonable but even humane; yet the ‘"almost" can never
drop out of any sane man's reaction, and as long as it remains there
the modest proposal will be both fantastic and immoral. When in
another passage Swift suddenly says, discussing the poverty of Ire-
land, ""But my Heart is too heavy to continue this Irony longer,"
he is speaking of satire, which breaks down when its content is too
oppressively real to permit the maintaining of the fantastic or
hypothetical tone. Hence satire is irony which is structurally close
to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one normal and
the other absurd, is reflected in its double focus of morality and
fantasy. Irony with little satire is the non-heroic residue of tragedy,
centering on a theme of puzzled defeat.
Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humor
founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other
is an object of attack. Attack without humor, or pure denunciation,
forms one of the boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary,
because invective is one of the most readable forms of literary art,
just as panegyric is one of the dullest It is an established datum
of literature that we like hearing people cursed and are bored with
hearing them praised, and almost any denunciation, if vigorous
enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon
breaks into a smile. To attack anything, writer and audience must
agree on its undesirability, which means that the content of a great
deal of satire founded on national hatreds, snobbery, prejudice,
and personal pique goes out of date very quickly.
But attack in literature can never be a pure expression of merely
personal or even social hatred, whatever the motivation for it may
be, because the words for expressing hatred, as distinct from en-
mity, have too limited a range. About the only ones we have are
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THEORY OF MYTHS
derived from the animal world, but calling a man a swine or a
skunk or a woman a bitch affords a severely restricted satisfaction,
as most of the unpleasant qualities of the animal are human pro-
jections. As Shakespeare's Thersites says of Menelaus, ''to what
form, but that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice
forced with wit, turn him to? To an ass, were nothing; he is both
ass and ox; to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass." For
effective attack we must reach some kind of impersonal level, and
that commits tlje attacker, if only by implication, to a moral stand-
ard. The satirist commonly takes a high moral line. Pope asserts
that he is "To Virtue only and her friends a friend," suggesting that
that is what he is really being when he is reflecting on the clean-
liness of the underwear worn by the lady who had jilted him.
Humor, like attack, is founded on convention. The world of
humor is a rigidly - stylized world in which generous Scotchmen,
obedient wives, beloved mothers-in-law, and professors with pres-
ence of mind are not permitted to exist. All humor demands agree-
ment that certain things, such as a picture of a wife beating her
husband in a comic strip, are conventionally funny. To introduce a
comic strip in which a husband beats his wife would distress the
reader, because it would mean learning a new convention. The
humor of pure fantasy, the other boundary of satire, belongs to
romance, though it is uneasy there, as humor perceives the incon-
gruous, and the conventions of romance are idealized. Most fantasy
is pulled back into satire by a powerful undertow often called al-
legory, which may be described as the implicit reference to ex-
perience in the perception of the incongruous. The White Knight
in Alice who felt that one should be provided for everything, and
therefore put anklets around his horse's feet to guard against the
bites of sharks, may pass as pure fantasy. But when he goes on to
sing an elaborate parody of Wordsworth we begin to snifiF the acrid,
pungent smell of satire, and when we take a second look at the
White Knight we recognize a character type closely related both to
Quixote and to the pedant of comedy.
As in this mythos we have the difficulty of two words to contend
with, it may be simplest, if the reader is now accustomed to our
sequence of six phases, to start with them and describe them in
order, instead of abstracting a typical form and discussing it first.
The first three are phases of satire, and conespond to the first three
or ironic phases of comedy.
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
The first phase corresponds to the first phase of ironic comedy
in which there is no displacement of the humorous society. The
sense of absurdity about such a comedy arises as a kind of back-
fire or recall after the work has been seen or read. Once we have
finished with it, deserts of futility open up on all sides, and we have,
in spite of the humor, a sense of nightmare and a close proximity
to something demonic. Even in very light-hearted comedy we may
get a trace of this feeling: if the main theme of Pride and Prejudice
had been the married life of Collins and Charlotte Lucas, one won-
ders how long Collins would continue to be funny. Hence it is in
decorum for even a satire prevailingly light in tone, such as Pope's
second Moral Essay on the characters of women, to rise to a ter-
rifying climax of moral intensity.
The satire typical of this phase may be called the satire of the
low norm. It takes for granted a world which is full of anomalies,
injustices, follies, and crimes, and yet is permanent and undisplace-
able. Its principle is that anyone who wishes to keep his balance in
such a world must leam first of all to keep his eyes open and his
mouth shut. Counsels of prudence, urging the reader in effect to
adopt an eiron role, have been prominent in literature from Egyp-
tian times. What is recommended is conventional life at its best:
a clairvoyant knowledge of human nature in oneself and others, an
avoidance of all illusion and compulsive behavior, a reliance on
observation and timing rather than on aggressiveness. This is wis-
dom, the tried and tested way of life, which does not question the
logic of social convention, but merely follows the procedures which
in fact do serve to maintain one's balance from one day to the next.
The eiron of the low norm takes an attitude of flexible pragmatism;
he assumes that society will, if given any chance, behave more or
less like Caliban's Setebos in Browning's poem, and he conducts
himself accordingly. On all doubtful points of behavior convention
is his deepest conviction. And however good or bad expertly con-
ventional behavior may be thought to be, it is certainly the most
diflEcult of all forms of behavior to satirize, just as anyone with a
new theory of behavior, even if saint or prophet, is the easiest of
all people to ridicule as a crank.
Hence the satirist may employ a plain, common-sense, conven-
tional person as a foil for the various alazons of society. Such a per-
son may be the author himself or a narrator, and he corresponds
to the plain dealer in comedy or the blunt adviser in tragedy. When
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THEORY OF MYTHS
distinguished from the author, he is often a rustic with pastoral
affinities, illustrating the connection of his role with the agroikos
type in comedy. The kind of American satire that passes as folk
humor, exemplified by the Biglow Papers, Mr. Dooley, Artemus
Ward, and Will Rogers, makes a good deal of him, and this genre
is closely linked with the North American development of the
counsel of prudence in Poor Richard's Almanac and the Sam Slick
papers. Other examples are easy enough to find, both where we ex-
pect them, as in Crabbe, whose tale The Patron also belongs to
the counsel-of-prudence genre, and where we might not expect
them, as in the Fish-Eater dialogue in Erasmus's Colloquies, Chau-
cer represents himself as a shy, demure, inconspicuous member of
his pilgrimage, agreeing politely with everybody (“And I seyde his
opinion was good" ) , and showing to the pilgrims none of the pow-
ers of observation that he displays to his reader. We are not sur-
prised therefore to find that one of his “own" tales is in the counsel
of prudence tradition.
The most elaborate form of low-norm satire is the encyclopaedic
form favored by the Middle Ages, closely allied to preaching, and
generally based on the encyclopaedic scheme of the seven deadly
sins, a form which survived as late as Elizabethan times in Nashe's
Pierce Penilesse and Lodge's Wits Miserie, Erasmus's Praise of
Folly belongs to this tradition, in which the link with the corre-
sponding comic phase, the view of an upside-down world dominated
by humors and ruling passions, can be clearly seen. When adopted
by a preacher, or even an intellectual, the low norm device is part
of an implied a fortiori argument: if people cannot reach even ordi-
nary common sense, or church porch virtue, there is little point in
comparing them with any higher standards.
Wiere gaiety predominates in such satire, we have an attitude
which fundamentally accepts social conventions but stresses tol-
erance and flexibility within their limits. Close to the conventional
norm we find the lovable eccentric, the Uncle Toby or Betsey Trot-
wood who diversifies, without challenging, accepted codes of be-
havior. Such characters have much of the child about them, and a
child's behavior is usually thought of as coming towards an ac-
cepted standard instead of moving away from it. Where attack
predominates, we have an inconspicuous, unobtmsive eiron stand-
ard contrasted with the alazons or blocking humors who are in
charge of society. This situation has for its archetype an ironic
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
counterpart of the romance theme of giant-killing. For society to
exist at all there must be a delegation of prestige and influence to
organized groups such as the church, the army, the professions and
the government, all of which consist of individuals given more than
individual power by the institutions to which they belong. If a
satirist presents, say, a clergyman as a fool or hypocrite, he is, qua
satirist, attacking neither a man nor a church. The former has no
literary or hypothetical point, and the latter carries him outside the
range of satire. He is attacking an evil man protected by his church,
and such a man is a gigantic monster: monstrous because not what
he should be, gigantic because protected by his position and by the
prestige of good clergymen. The cowl might make the monk if it
were not for satire.
Milton says, ''for a Satyr as it was bom out of a Tragedy, so ought
to resemble his parentage, to strike high, and adventure dangerously
at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons.'' Apart from
the etymology, this needs one qualification: a great vice does not
need a great person to represent it. We have mentioned the gigantic
size of Sir Epicure Mammon's dream in The Alchemist: the whole
mystery of the corrupted human will is in it, yet the utter impotence
of the dreamer is essential to the satire. Similarly, we miss much
of the point of Jonathan Wild unless we take the hero seriously
as a parody of greatness, or false social standards of valuation. But
in general the principle maybe accepted for the satirist's antagonists
that the larger they come, the easier they fall. In low-norm satire
the alazon is a Goliath encountered by a tiny David with his sud-
den and vicious stones, a giant prodded by a cool and observant
but almost invisible enemy into a blind, stampeding fury and then
polished off at leisure. This situation has run through satire from
the stories of Polyphemus and Blunderbore to, in a much more
ironic and equivocal context, the Chaplin films. Dryden transforms
his victims into fantastic dinosaurs of bulging flesh and peanut
brains; he seems genuinely impressed by the "goodly and great"
bulk of Og and by the furious energy of the poet Doeg.
The figure of the low-norm eiron is irony's substitute for the
hero, and when he is removed from satire we can see more clearly
that one of the central themes of the mythos is the disappearance
of the heroic. This is the main reason for the predominance in fic-
tional satire of what may be called the Omphale archetype, the
man bullied or dominated by women, which has been prominent in
228
THEORY OF MYTHS
satire all through its history, and embraces a vast area of contem-
porary humor, both popular and sophisticated. Similarly, when the
giant or monster is removed we can see that he is the mythical
form of society, the hydra or fama full of tongues, Spenser's blatant
beast which is still at large. And while the crank with his new idea
is an obvious target for satire, still social convention is mainly fos-
silized dogma, and the standard appealed to by low-norm satire
is a set of conventions largely invented by dead cranks. The strength
of the conventional person is not in the conventions but in his com-
mon-sense way of handling them. Hence the logic of satire itself
drives it on from its first phase of conventional satire on the un-
conventional to a second phase in which the sources and values of
conventions themselves are objects of ridicule.
The simplest form of the corresponding second phase of comedy
is the comedy of escape, in which a hero runs away to a more con-
genial society without transforming his own. The satiric counter-
part of this is the picaresque novel, the story of the successful rogue
who, from Reynard the Fox on, makes conventional society look
foolish without setting up any positive standard. The picaresque
novel is the social form of what with Don Quixote modulates into
a more intellectualized satire, the nature of which needs some ex-
planation.
Satire, according to Juvenal's useful if hackneyed formula, has an
interest in anything men do. The philosopher, on the other hand,
teaches a certain way or method of living; he stresses some things
and despises others; what he recommends is carefully selected from
the data of human life; he continually passes moral judgements on
social behavior. His attitude is dogmatic; that of the satirist prag-
matic. Hence satire may often represent the collision between a
selection of standards from experience and the feeling that experi-
ence is bigger than any set of beliefs about it. The satirist demon-
strates the infinite variety of what men do by showing the futility,
not only of saying what they ought to do, but even of attempts to
systematize or formulate a coherent scheme of what they do. Philos-
ophies of life abstract from life, and an abstraction implies the
leaving out of inconvenient data. The satirist brings up these in-
convenient data, sometimes in the form of alternative and equally
plausible theories, like the Erewhonian treatment of crime and
disease or Swift's demonstration of the mechanical operation of
spirit.
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THIRD essay: archetypal criticism
The central theme in the second or quixotic phase of satire, then,
is the setting of ideas and generalizations and theories and dogmas
over against the life they are supposed to explain. This theme is
presented very clearly in Lucian's dialogue The Sale of Lives, in
which a series of slave-philosophers pass in review, with all their
arguments and guarantees, before a buyer who has to consider liv-
ing with them. He buys a few, it is true, but as slaves, not as mas-
ters or teachers. Lucian's attitude to Greek philosophy is repeated
in the attitude of Erasmus and Rabelais to the scholastics, of Swift
and Samuel Butler I to Descartes and the Royal Society, of Vol-
taire to the Leibnitzians, of Peacock to the Romantics, of Samuel
Butler II to the Darwinians, of Aldous Huxley to the behaviorists.
We notice that low-norm satire often becomes merely anti-intellec-
tual, a tendency that crops up in Crabbe {vide The Learned Boy)
and even in Swift. The influence of low-norm satire in American
culture has produced a popular contempt for longhairs and ivory
towers, an example of what may be called a fallacy of poetic pro-
jection, or taking literary conventions to be facts of life. Anti-in-
tellectual satire proper, however, is based on a sense of the com-
parative naivete of systematic thought, and should not be limited
by such ready-made terms as skeptical or cynical.
Skepticism itself may be or become a dogmatic attitude, a comic
humor of doubting plain evidence. Cynicism is a little closer to the
satiric norm: Menippus, the founder of the Menippean satire, was
a cynic, and cynics are generally associated with the role of intel-
lectual Thersites. Lyly's play Campaspe, for instance, presents Plato,
Aristotle, and Diogenes, but the first two are bores, and Diogenes,
who is not a philosopher at all but an Elizabethan clown of the
malcontent type, steals the show. But still cynicism is a philosophy,
and one that may produce the strange spiritual pride of the Pere-
grinus of whom Lucian makes a searching and terrible analysis. In
the Sale of Lives the cynic and the skeptic are auctioned in their
turn, and the latter is the last to be sold, dragged off to have his
very skepticism refuted, not by argument but by life. Erasmus and
Burton called themselves Democritus Junior, followers of the phi-
losopher who laughed at mankind, but Lucian's buyer considers
that Democritus too has overdone his pose. Insofar as the satirist
has a ''position" of his own, it is the preference of practice to theory,
experience to metaphysics. When Lucian goes to consult his master
Menippus, he is told that the method of wisdom is to do the task
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THEORY OF MYTHS
that lies to hand, advice repeated in Voltaire's Candide and in t 3 ie
instructions given to the unborn in Erewhon. Thus philosophical
pedantry becomes, as every target of satire eventually does, a form
of romanticism or the imposing of over-simplified ideals on ex-
perience.
The satiric attitude here is neither philosophical nor anti-philo-
sophical, but an expression of the hypothetical form of art. Satire
on ideas is only the special hind of art that defends its own creative
detachment. TTie demand for order in thought produces a supply
of intellectual systems: some of these attract and convert artists,
but as an equally great poet could defend any other system equally
well, no one system can contain the arts as they stand. Hence a
systematic reasoner, given the power, would be likely to establish
hierarchies in the arts, or censor and expurgate as Plato wished to
do to Homer. Satire on systems of reasoning, especially on the so-
cial effects of such systems, is art's first line of defence against all
such invasions.
In the warfare of science against superstition, the satirists have
done famously. Satire itself appears to have begun with the Greek
silloi which were pro-scientific attacks on superstition. In English
literature, Chaucer and Ben Jonson riddled the alchemists with a
cross-fire of their own jargon; Nashe and Swift hounded astrologers
into premature graves; Browning's Sludge the Medium annihilated
the spiritualists, and a rabble of occultists, numerologists, Pythago-
reans, and Rosicrucians lie sprawling in the wake of Hudibras. To
the scientist it may seem little short of perverse that satire placidly
goes on making fun of legitimate astronomers in The Elephant
in the Moon, of experimental laboratories in Gulliver's Travels, of
Darwinian and Malthusian cosmology in Erewhon, of conditioned
reflexes in Brave New World, of technological eficiency in 1984.
Charles Fort, one of the few who have continued the tradition of
intellectual satire in this century, brings the wheel full circle by
mocking the scientists for their very freedom from superstition it-
self, a rational attitude which, like all rational attitudes, still refuses
to examine all the evidence.
Similarly with religion. The satirist may feel with Lucian that the
eliminating of superstition would also eliminate religion, or with
Erasmus that it would restore health to religion. But whether Zeus
exists or not is a question; that men who think him vicious and
stupid will insist that he change the weather is a fact, accepted by
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THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
scoffer and devout alike. Any really devout person would surely
welcome a satirist who cauterized hypocrisy and superstition as an
ally of true religion. Yet once a hypocrite who sounds exactly like
a good man is suEciently blackened, the good man also may
begin to seem a little dingier than he was. Those who would agree
even with the theoretical parts of Holy Willie*s ^Prayer in Bums
look rather like Holy Willies themselves. One feels similarly that
while the personal attitudes of Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, and Vol-
taire to institutional religion varied a good deal, the effect of their
satire varies much less. Satire on religion includes the parody of the
sacramental life in English Protestantism that runs from Milton's
divorce pamphlets to The Way of All Fleshy and the antagonism to
Christianity in Nietzsche, Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence based on the
conception of Jesus as another kind of romantic idealist.
The narrator in Erewhon remarks that while the real religion of
most of the Erewhonians was, whatever they said it was, the accept-
ance of low-norm conventionality (the goddess Ydgrun), there was
also a small group of ^'high Ydgrunites" who were the best people he
found in Erewhon. The attitude of these people reminds us rather
of Montaigne: they had the eirorCs sense of the value of conven-
tions that had been long established and were now harmless; they
had the eirorCs distrust of the ability of anyone's reason, including
their own, to transform society into a better structure. But they were
also intellectually detached from the conventions they lived with,
and were capable of seeing their anomalies and absurdities as well
as their stabilizing conservatism.
The literary form that high Ydgrunism produces in second-phase
satire we may call the ingenu form, after Voltaire's dialogue of
that name. Here an outsider to the society, in this case an Ameri-
can Indian, is the low norm: he has no dogmatic views of his own,
but he grants none of the' premises which make the absurdities of
society look logical to those accustomed to them. He is really a
pastoral figure, and like the pastoral, a form congenial to satire, he
contrasts a set of simple standards with the complex rationaliza-
tions of society. But we have just seen that it is precisely the com-
plexity of data in experience which the satirist insists on and the
simple set of standards which he distrusts. That is why the ingenu
is an outsider; he comes from another world which is either unat-
tainable or associated with something else undesirable. Montaigne's
cannibals have all the virtues we have not, if we don't mind being
THEORY OF MYTHS
cannibals. More's Utopia is an ideal state except that to enter it
we must give up the idea of Christendom. The Houyhnhnms live
the life of reason and nature better than we, but Gulliver finds
that he is born a Yahoo, and that such a life would be nearer the
capacities of gifted animals than of humans. Whenever the “other
world" appears in satire, it appears as an ironic counterpart to our
own, a reversal of accepted social standards. This form of satire is
represented in Lucian's Kataploiis and Charon, journeys to the
other world in which the eminent in this one are shown doing ap-
propriate but unaccustomed things, a form incorporated in Rabe-
lais, and in the medieval danse macabre. In the last named the
simple equality of death is set against the complex inequalities of
life.
Intellectual satire defends the creative detachment in art, but art
too tends to seek out socially accepted ideas and become in its
turn a social fixation. We have spoken of the idealized art of ro-
mance as in particular the form in which an ascendant class tends
to express itself, and so the rising middle class in medieval Europe
naturally turned to mock-romance. Other forms of satire have a
similar function, whether so intended or not. The danse macabre
and the kataplous are ironic reversals of the kind of romanticism
that we have in the serious vision of the other world. In Dante, for
instance, the judgements of the next world usually confirm the
standards of this one, and in heaven itself nearly the whole avail-
able billeting is marked for officers only. The cultural effect of such
satire is not to denigrate romance, but to prevent any group of con-
ventions from dominating the whole of literary experience. Second-
phase satire shows literature assuming a special function of analysis,
of breaking up the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, supersti-
tious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fash-
ions, and all other things that impede the free movement (not
necessarily, of course, the progress) of society. Such satire is the
completion of the logical process known as the reductio ad absur-
dum, which is not designed to hold one in perpetual captivity, but to
bring one to the point at which one can escape from an incorrect
procedure.
The romantic fixation which revolves around the beauty of per-
fect form, in art or elsewhere, is also a logical target for satire. The
word satire is said to come from satura, or hash, and a kind of
parody of form seems to run all through its tradition, from the mix-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
ture of prose and verse in early satire to the jerky cinematic changes
of scene in Rabelais (I am thinking of a somewhat archaic type
of cinema). Tristram Shandy and Don Juan illustrate very clearly
the constant tendency to self-parody in satiric rhetoric which pre-
vents even the process of writing itself from becoming an over-
simplified convention or ideal. In Don Juan we simultaneously read
the poem and watch the poet at work writing it: we eavesdrop on
his associations, his struggles for rhymes, his tentative and dis-
carded plans, the subjective preferences organizing his choice of
details (e.g.: ''Her stature tall— I hate a dumpy woman''), his de-
cisions whether to be "serious" or mask himself with humor. All
of this and even more is true of Tristram Shandy. A deliberate ram-
bling digressiveness, which in A Tale of a Tub reaches the point of
including a digression in praise of digressions, is endemic in the
narrative technique of satire, and so is a calculated bathos or art
of sinking in its suspense, such as the quizzical mock-oracular con-
clusions in Apuleius and Rabelais and in the refusal of Sterne for
hundreds of pages even to get his hero born. An extraordinary num-
ber of great satires are fragmentary, unfinished, or anonymous. In
ironic fiction a good many devices turning on the difficulty of com-
munication, such as having a story presented through an idiot mihd,
serve the same purpose. Virginia Woolf's The Waves is made up
of speeches of characters constructed precisely out of what they
do not say, but what their behavior and attitudes say in spite of
them.
This technique of disintegration brings us well into the third
phase of satire, the satire of the high norm. Second-phase satire
may make a tactical defence of the pragmatic against the dogmatic,
but here we must let go even of ordinary common sense as a stand-
ard. For common sense too has certain implied dogmas, notably
that the data of sense experience are reliable and consistent, and
that our customary associations with things form a solid basis for
interpreting the present and predicting the future. The satirist can-
not explore all the possibilities of his form without seeing what
happens if he questions these assumptions. That is why he so often
gives to ordinary life a logical and self-consistent shift of perspec-
tive. He will show us society suddenly in a telescope as posturing
and dignified pygmies, or in a microscope as hideous and reeking
giants, or he will change his hero into an ass and show us how
humanity looks from an ass's point of view. This type of fantasy
234
THEORY OF MYTHS
breaks down customary associations, reduces sense experience to
one of many possible categories, and brings out the tentative, als ob
basis of all our thinking. Emerson says that such shifts of perspec-
tive afford ''a low degree of the sublime/' but actually they afford
something of far greater artistic importance, a high degree of the
ridiculous. And, consistently with the general basis of satire as
parody-romance, they are usually adaptations of romance themes:
the fairyland of little people, the land of giants, the world of en-
chanted animals, the wonderlands parodied in Lucian's True His-
tory.
When we fall back from the outworks of faith and reason to the
tangible realities of the senses, satire follows us up. A slight shift
of perspective, a different tinge in the emotional coloring, and the
solid earth becomes an intolerable horror. Gullivefs Travels shows
us man as a venomous rodent, man as a noisome and clumsy pachy-
derm, the mind of man as a bear-pit, and the body of man as a
compound of filth and ferocity. But Swift is simply following where
his satiric genius leads him, and genius seems to have led practically
every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene. Social
convention means people parading in front of each other, and the
preservation of it demands that the dignity of some men and the
beauty of some women should be thought of apart from excretion,
copulation, and similar embarrassments. Constant reference to these
latter brings us down to a bodily democracy paralleling the de-
mocracy of death in the danse macabre. Swift's afinity with the
danse macabre tradition is marked in his description of the Struld-
brugs, and his Directions to Servants and his more unquotable po-
ems are in the tradition of the medieval preachers who painted the
repulsiveness of gluttony and lechery. For here as everywhere else
in satire there is a moral reference: it is all very well to eat, drink,
and be merry, but one cannot always put off dying until tomorrow.
In the riotous chaos of Rabelais, Petronius, and Apuleius satire
plunges through to its final victory over common sense. When we
have finished with their weirdly logical fantasies of debauch, dream,
and delirium we wake up wondering if Paracelsus' suggestion is
right that the things seen in delirium are really there, like stars in
daytime, and invisible for the same reason. Lucius becomes initi-
ated and slips evasively out of our grasp, whether he lied or told
the truth, as St. Augustine says with a touch of exasperation; Rabe-
lais promises us a final oracle and leaves us staring at an empty bot-
^35
THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
tie; Joyce's HCE struggles for pages toward wakening, but just
as we seem on the point of grasping something tangible we are
swung around to the first page of the book again. The Satyricon is
a torn fragment from what seems like a history of some monstrous
Atlantean race that vanished in the sea, still drunk.
The first phase of satire is dominated by the figure of the giant-
killer, but in this rending of the stable universe a giant power rears
up in satire itself. When the Philistine giant comes out to battle
with the children of light, he naturally expects to find someone his
own size ready to meet him, someone who is head and shoulders
over every man in Israel. Such a Titan would have to bear down his
opponent by sheer weight of words, and hence be a master of that
technique of torrential abuse which we call invective. The gigantic
figures in Rabelais, the awakened forms of the bound or sleeping
giants that meet us in Finnegans Wake and the opening of Gul-
livers Travels j are expressions of a creative exuberance of which the
most typical and obvious sign is the verbal tempest, the tremendous
outpouring of words in catalogues, abusive epithets and erudite
technicalities which since the third chapter of Isaiah (a satire on
female ornament) has been a feature, and almost a monopoly, of
third-phase satire. Its golden age in English literature was the age
of Burton, Nashe, Marston, and Urquhart of Cromarty, the unin-
hibited translator of Rabelais, who in his spare time was what Nashe
would call a '"scholastical squitter-book,'" producing books with such
titles as Trissotetras, Pantochronochanon, Exkubalauron and Logo
pandecteison. Nobody except Joyce has in modern English made
much sustained effort to carry on this tradition of verbal exuber-
ance: even Carlyle, from this point of view, is a sad comedown after
Burton and Urquhart, In American culture it is represented by the
''tall talk” of the folklore boaster, which has some literary con-
geners in the catalogues of Whitman and Moby Dick.
With the fourth phase we move around to the ironic aspect of
tragedy, and satire begins to recede. The fall of the tragic hero,
especially in Shakespeare, is so delicately balanced emotionally that
we almost exaggerate any one element in it merely by calling atten-
tion to it. One of these elements is the elegiac aspect in which irony
is at a minimum, the sense of gentle and dignified pathos, often
symbolized by music, which marks the desertion of Antony by
Hercules, the dream of the rejected Queen Catherine in Hen-
ry VIII, Hamlet's "absent thee from felicity awhile,” and Othello's
236
THEORY OF MYTHS
Aleppo speech. One can of course find irony even here, as Mr.
Eliot has found it in the last named, but the main emotional weight
is surely thrown on the opposite side. Yet we are also aware that
Hamlet dies in the middle of a frantically muddled effort at revenge
which has taken eight lives instead of one, that Cleopatra fades
away with great dignity after a careful search for easy ways to die,
that Coriolanus is badly confused by his mother and violently re-
sents being called a boy. Such tragic irony differs from satire in
that there is no attempt to make fun of the character, but only
to bring out clearly the ''all too human,'" as distinct from the
heroic, aspects of the tragedy. King Lear attempts to achieve heroic
dignity through his position as a king and father, and finds it in-
stead in his suffering humanity: hence it is in King Lear that we
find what has been called the "comedy of the grotesque," the ironic
parody of the tragic situation, most elaborately developed.
As a phase of irony in its own right, the fourth phase looks at trag-
edy from below, from the moral and realistic perspective of the state
of experience. It stresses the humanity of its heroes, minimizes the
sense of ritual inevitability in tragedy, supplies social and psychologi-
cal explanations for catastrophe, and makes as much as possible of
human misery seem, in Thoreau's phrase, "superfluous and evita-
ble." This is the phase of most sincere, explicit realism: it is in
general Tolstoy's phase, and also that of a good deal of Hardy and
Conrad. One of its central themes is Stein's answer to the problem
of the "romantic" Lord Jim in Conrad: "in the destructive ele-
ment immerse." This remark, without ridiculing Jim, still brings
out the quixotic and romantic element in his nature and criticizes
it from the point of view of experience. The chapter on watches
and chronometers in Melville's Pierre takes a similar attitude.
The fifth phase, cbrresponding to fatalistic or fifth-phase tragedy,
is irony in which the main emphasis is on the natural cycle, the
steady unbroken turning of the wheel of fate or fortune. It sees
experience, in our terms, with the point of epiphany closed up, and
its motto is Browning's "there may be heaven; there must be hell."
Like the corresponding phase of tragedy, it is less moral and more
generalized and metaphysical in its interest, less melioristic and
more stoical and resigned. The treatment of Napoleon in War and
Peace and in The Dynasts affords a good contrast between the
fourth and fifth phases of irony. The refrain in the Old English
Complaint of Deor: "Thaes ofereode; thisses swa maeg" (freely
237
THIRD essay: archetypal CRITICISM
translatable as ''Other people got through things; maybe I can’')
expresses a stoicism not of the "invictus" type, which maintains a
romantic dignity, but rather a sense, found also in the parallel sec-
ond phase of satire, that the practical and immediate situation is
likely to be worthy of more respect than the theoretical explanation
of it.
The sixth phase presents human life in terms of largely unre-
lieved bondage. Its settings feature prisons, madhouses, lynching
mobs, and places of execution, and it differs from a pure inferno
mainly in the fact that in human experience suffering has an end
in death. In our day the chief form of this phase is the nightmare
of social tyranny, of which 1984 is perhaps the most familiar. We
often find, on this boundary of the yisio malejica, the use of parody-
religious symbols suggesting some form of Satan or Antichrist wor-
ship. In Kafka's In the Penal Colony a parody of original sin ap-
pears in the officer's remark, "Guilt is never to be doubted." In
19S4 the parody of religion in the final scenes is more elaborate:
there is a parody of the atonement, for instance, when the hero is
tortured into urging that the torments be inflicted on the heroine
instead. The assumption is made in this story that the lust for
sadistic power on the part of the ruling class is strong enough to
last indefinitely, which is precisely the assumption one has to make
about devils in order to accept the orthodox picture of hell The
"telescreen" device brings into irony the tragic theme of derkou
theama, the humiliation of being constantly watched by a hostile
or derisive eye.
The human figures of this phase are, of course, desdichado figures
of misery or madness, often parodies of romantic roles. Thus the
romantic theme of the helpful servant giant is parodied in The
Hairy Ape and Of Mice and Men, and the romantic presenter or
Prospero figure is parodied in the Benjy of The Sound and the Fury
whose idiot mind contains, without comprehending, the whole ac-
tion of the novel. Sinister parental figures naturally abound, for
this is the world of the ogre and the witch, of Baudelaire's black
giantess and Pope's goddess Dullness, who also has much of the
parody deity about her ("Light dies before thy uncreating word!"),
of the siren with the imprisoning image of shrouding hair, and, of
course, of the femme fatale or malignant grinning female, "older
than the rocks among which she sits," as Pater says of her.
This brings us around again to the point of demonic epiphany,
238
THEORY OF MYTHS
the dark tower and prison of endless pain, the city of dreadful night
in the desert, or, with a more erudite irony, the tour abolie, the
goal of the quest that isn't there. But on the other side of this
blasted world of repulsiveness and idiocy, a world without pity and
without hope, satire begins again. At the bottom of Dante's hell,
which is also the center of the spherical earth, Dante sees Satan
standing upright in the circle of ice, and as he cautiously follows
Virgil over the hip and thigh of the evil giant, letting himself down
by the tufts of hair on his skin, he passes the center and finds him-
self no longer going down but going up, climbing out on the other
side of the world to see the stars again. From this point of view,
the devil is no longer upright, but standing on his head, in the same
attitude in which he was hurled downward from heaven upon the
other side of the earth. Tragedy and tragic irony take us into a
hell of narrowing circles and culminate in some such vision of the
source of all evil in a personal form. Tragedy can take us no farther;
but if we persevere with the mythos of irony and satire, we shall
pass a dead center, and finally see the gentlemanly Prince of Dark-
ness bottom side up.
FOURTH ESSAY
Rhetorical Criticism; Theory of Genres
Fourtk Essay
RHETORICAL CRITICISM; THEORY OF GENRES
INTRODUCTION
The present book employs a diagrammatic framework that has
been used in poetics ever since Plato's time. This is the division
of ''the good" into three main areas, of which the world of art,
beauty, feeling, and taste is the central one, and is flanked by two
other worlds. One is the world of social action and events, the other
the world of individual thought and ideas. Reading from left to
right, this threefold structure divides human faculties into will,
feeling, and reason. It divides the mental constructs which these
faculties produce into history, art, and science and philosophy. It
divides the ideals which form compulsions or obligations on these
faculties into law, beauty, and truth. Poe gives his version of the
diagram (right to left) as Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral
Sense. "I place Taste in the middle," said Poe, "because it is just
this position which in the mind it occupies." Until someone can
refute this admirable explanation, we shall retain the traditional
structure. True, we have hinted that there may be another way of
looking at it in which the middle world is not simply one of three
but a trinity containing them all. But as yet the simpler conception
has by no means exhausted its usefulness for us.
Similarly, we have portrayed the poetic symbol as intermediate
between event and idea, example and precept, ritual and dream,
and have finally displayed it as Aristotle's ethos, human nature and
the human situation, between and made up of mythos and dianoia,
which are verbal imitations of action and thought respectively.
There is however still another aspect of the same diagram. The
world of social action and event, the world of time and process,
has a particularly close association with the ear. The ear listens,
and the ear translates what it hears into practical conduct. The
world of individual thought and idea has a correspondingly close
association with the eye, and nearly all our expressions for thought,
from the Greek theoria down, are connected with visual metaphors.
Further, not only does art as a whole seem to be central to events
and ideas, but literature seems in a way to be central to the arts.
H3
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
It appeals to the ear, and so partakes of the nature of music, but
music is a much more concentrated art of the ear and of the imagi-
native perception of time. Literature appeals to at least the inner
eye, and so partakes of the nature of the plastic arts, but the plastic
arts, especially painting, are much more concentrated on the eye
and on the spatial world. We notice that Aristotle gives a list of
six elements of poetry, three of which, mythos, ethos and dianoia,
we have been considering. The other three, meloSy lexis, and opsis
(spectacle) , deal with this second aspect of the same diagram. Con-
sidered as a verbal structure, literature presents a lexis which com-
bines two other elements: melos, an element analogous to or other-
wise connected with music, and opsis, which has a similar con-
nection with the plastic arts. The word lexis itself may be trans-
lated ''diction” when we are thinking of it as a narrative sequence
of sounds caught by the ear, and as "imagery” when we are think-
ing of it as forming a simultaneous pattern of meaning apprehended
in an act of mental "vision.” This second or rhetorical aspect of
literature we must now turn to examine. It is an aspect which re-
turns us to the "literal” level of narrative and meaning, the context
that Ezra Pound has in mind when he speaks of the three qualities
of poetic creation as melopoeia, logopoeia, and phanopoeia. The
terms musical and pictorial are often employed figuratively in liter-
ary criticism, and we shall attempt among other things to see how
much genuine sense they make as critical terms.
The word "rhetoric” reminds us of yet another triad: the tradi-
tional division of studies based on words into a "trivium” of gram-
mar, rhetoric, and logic. While grammar and logic have become the
names of specific sciences, they also retain something of a more
general connection with the narrative and significant aspects respec-
tively of all verbal structures. As grammar may be called the art of
ordering words, there is a sense— a literal sense— in which grammar
and narrative are the same thing; as logic may be called the art of
producing meaning, there is a sense in which logic and meaning are
the same thing. The second part of this sentence is more traditional,
and hence more familiar. There is no historical justification for the
first part, as the art of constructing narrative ("invention,” "disposi-
tion,” and the like) has traditionally formed a part of rhetoric. Let
us, however, in spite of history, begin with an association between
narrative and grammar, grammar being understood primarily as syn-
tax or getting words in the right (narrative) order, and between logic
THEORY OF GENRES
and meaning, logic being understood primarily as words arranged in
a pattern with significance. Grammar is the linguistic aspect of a
verbal structure; logic is the “sense"' which is the permanent com-
mon factor in translation.
What we have been calling assertive, descriptive, or- factual writ-
ing tends to be, or attempts to be, a direct union of grammar and
logic. An argument cannot be logically correct unless it is verbally
correct, the right words chosen and the proper syntactical rela-
tions among them established. Nor does a verbal narrative com-
municate anything to a reader unless it has continuous significance.
In assertive writing, therefore, there seems to be little place for
any such middle term as rhetoric, and in fact we often find that
among philosophers, scientists, jurists, critics, historians, and theo-
logians, rhetoric is looked upon with some distrust.
Rhetoric has from the beginning meant two things: ornamental
speech and persuasive speech. These two things seem psychologi-
cally opposed to each other, as the desire to ornament is essentially
disinterested, and the desire to persuade essentially the reverse. In
fact ornamental rhetoric is inseparable from literature itself, or
what we have called the hypothetical verbal structure which exists
for its own sake. Persuasive rhetoric is applied literature, or the use
of literary art to reinforce the power of argument. Ornamental
rhetoric acts on its hearers statically, leading them to admire its
own beauty or wit; persuasive rhetoric tries to lead them kinetically
toward a course of action. One articulates emotion; the other
manipulates it. And whatever we decide about the ultimate literary
status of oratory, there seems little doubt that ornamental rhetoric
is the lexis or verbal texture of poetry. Aristotle remarks, when he
comes to lexis in the Poetics, that that subject belongs more prop-
erly to rhetoric. We may, then, adopt the following tentative pos-
tulate: that if the direct union of grammar and logic is characteris-
tic of non-literary verbal structures, literature may be described as
the rhetorical organization of grammar and logic. Most of the fea-
tures characteristic of literary form, such as rhyme, alliteration,
metre, antithetical balance, the use of exempla, are also rhetorical
schemata.
The psychology of creation is not our theme, but it must happen
very rarely that a writer sits down to write without any notion of
what he proposes to produce. In the poet's mind, then, some kind
of controlling and coordinating power, what Coleridge called the
FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
■'initiative/' establishes itself very early, gradually assimilates every-
thing to itself, and finally reveals itself to be the containing form
of the work. This initiative is clearly not a unit but a complex of
factors. The theme is one such factor; the sense of the unity of
mood which makes certain images appropriate and others not is
another. If what is produced is to be a poem in a regular metre,
the metre will be a third: if not, some other integrating rhythm
will be present. We remarked earlier, too, that the poet's intention
to produce a poem normally includes the genre, the intention of
producing a specific kind of verbal structure. The poet thus is in-
cessantly deciding that certain things, whether they can be critically
accounted for by himself or not, belong in his structure, and that
what he cuts out in revising does not, though it may be good
enough in itself to belong somewhere else. But as the structure is
complex, so these decisions relate to a variety of poetic elements,
or a group of initiatives. Of these, theme and the choice of images
engaged our attention in the previous essay; genre and the integrat-
ing rhythm concern us here.
We complained in our introduction that the theory of genres
was an undeveloped subject in criticism. We have the three generic
terms drama, epic, and lyric, derived from the Greeks, but we use
the latter two chiefly as jargon or trade slang for long and short (or
shorter) poems respectively. The middle-sized poem does not even
have a jargon term to describe it, and any long poem gets to be
called an epic, especially if it is divided into a dozen or so parts,
like Browning's Ring and the Book. This poem takes a dramatic
structure, a triangle of jealous husband, patient wife, and chivalrous
lover involved in a murder trial with courtroom and death-house
scenes, and works it all out through the soliloquies of the charac-
ters. It is an astounding tour de force, but we can fully appreciate
this only when we see it as a generic experiment in drama, a drama
turned inside out, as it were. Similarly, we call Shelley's Ode to the
West Wind a lyric, perhaps because it is a lyric; if we hesitate to
call Epipsychidion a lyric, and have no idea what it is, we can al-
ways call it the product of an essentially lyrical genius. It is shorter
than the Iliad, and there's an end of it
However, the origin of the words drama, epic, and lyric suggests
that the central principle of genre is simple enough. The basis of
generic distinctions in literature appears to be the radical of presen-
2^6
THEORY OF GENRES
tation. Words may be acted in front of a spectator; they may be
spoken in front of a listener; they may be sung or chanted; or they
may be written for a reader. Criticism, we note resignedly in pass-
ing, has no word for the individual member of an author s audience,
and the word “audience'' itself does not really cover all genres, as
it is slightly illogical to describe the readers of a book as an audi-
ence. The basis of generic criticism in any case is rhetorical, in the
sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established
between the poet and his public.
We have to speak of the Tadical of presentation if the distinctions
of acted, spoken, and written word are to mean anything in the
age of the printing press. One may print a lyric or read a novel
aloud, but such incidental changes are not enough in themselves to
alter the genre. For all the loving care that is rightfully expended
on the printed texts of Shakespeare's plays, they are still radically
acting scripts, and belong to the genre of drama. If a Romantic
poet gives his poem a dramatic form, he may not expect or even
want any stage representation; he may think entirely in terms of
print and readers; he may even believe, like many Romantics, that
the stage drama is an impure form because of the limitations it puts
on individual expression. Yet the poem is still being referred back
to some kind of theatre, however much of a castle in the air. A
novel is written, but when Conrad employs a narrator to help him
tell his story, the genre of the written word is being assimilated to
that of the spoken one.
The question of how we are to classify such a novel is less im-
portant than the recognition of the fact that two different radicals
of presentation exist in it. It might be thought simpler, instead of
using the term radical, to say that the generic distinctions are among
the ways in which literary works are ideally presented, whatever
the actualities are. But Milton, for example, seems to have no ideal
of reciter and audience in mind for Paradise Lost; he seems con-
tent to leave it, in practice, a poem to be read in a book. When he
uses the convention of invocation, thus bringing the poem into the
genre of the spoken word, the significance of the convention is to
indicate what tradition his work primarily belongs to and what its
closest affinities are with. The purpose of criticism by genres is not
so much to classify as to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby
bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
not be noticed as long as there were no context established for
them.
The genre of the spoken word and the listener is very difficult to
describe in English, but part of it is what the Greeks meant by the
phrase ta epe, poems intended to be recited, not necessarily epics
of the conventional jumbo size. Such ''epic'' material does not have
to be in metre, as the prose tale and the prose oration are important
spoken forms. The difference between metre and prose is evidently
not in itself a generic difference, as the example of drama shows,
though it tends to become one. In this essay I use the word ''epos''
to describe works in which the radical of presentation is oral ad-
dress, keeping the word epic for its customary use as the name of
the form of the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Paradise Lost Epos
thus takes in all literature, in verse or prose, which makes some at-
tempt to preserve the convention of recitation and a listening audi-
ence.
The Greeks gave us the names of three of our four genres: they
did not give us a word for the genre that addresses a reader through
a book, and naturally we have not invented one of our own. The
nearest to it is "history," but this word, in spite of Tom Jones, has
gone outside literature, and the Latin "scripture" is too specialized
in meaning. As I have to have some word, I shall make an arbitrary
choice of "fiction" to describe the genre of the printed page. I know
that I used this word in the first essay in a different context, but it
seems better to compromise with the present confused terminology
than to increase the difficulties of this book by introducing too
many new terms. The analogy of the keyboard in music may illus-
trate the difference between fiction and other genres which for
practical purposes exist in books. A book, like a keyboard, is a
mechanical device for bringing an entire artistic structure under the
interpretive control of a single person. But just as it is possible to
distinguish genuine piano music from the piano score of an opera
or symphony, so we may distinguish genuine "book literature" from
books containing the reduced textual scores of recited or acted
pieces.
The connection between a speaking poet and a listening audi-
ence, which may be actual in Homer or Chaucer, soon becomes in-
creasingly theoretical, and as it does so epos passes insensibly into
fiction. One may even suggest, not quite seriously, that the legend-
ary figure of the blind bard, which is used so effectively by Milton,
THEORY OF GENRES
indicates that the drift toward an unseen audience sets in very early.
But whenever the same material does duty for both genres, the dis-
tinction between the genres becomes immediately apparent. The
chief distinction, though not a simple one of length, is involved
with the fact that epos is episodic and fiction continuous. The
novels of Dickens are, as books, fiction; as serial publications in a
magazine designed for family reading, they are still fundamentally
fiction, though closer to epos. But when Dickens began to give read-
ings from his own works, the genre changed wholly to epos; the
emphasis was then thrown on immediacy of effect before a visible
audience.
In drama, the hypothetical or internal characters of the story con-
front the audience directly, hence the drama is marked by the con-
cealment of the author from his audience. In very spectacular dra-
ma, such as we get in many movies, the author is of relatively little
importance. Drama, like music, is an ensemble performance for an
audience, and music and drama are most likely to flourish in a
society with a strong consciousness of itself as a society, like Eliz-
abethan England. When a society becomes individualized and
competitive, like Victorian England, music and drama suffer ac-
cordingly, and the written word almost monopolizes literature. In
epos, the author confronts his audience directly, and the hypotheti-
cal characters of his story are concealed. The author is still theo-
retically there when he is being represented by a rhapsode or min-
strel, for the latter speaks as the poet, not as a character in the po-
em. In written literature both the author and his characters are con-
cealed from the reader.
The fourth possible arrangement, the concealment of the poet’s
audience from the poet, is presented in the lyric. There is, as usual,
no word for the audience of the lyric: what is wanted is something
analogous to ''chorus” which does not suggest simultaneous pres-
ence or dramatic context. The lyric is, to go back to Mill’s aphorism
referred to at the beginning of this book, preeminently the utter-
ance that is overheard. The lyric poet normally pretends to be talk-
ing to himself or to someone else: a spirit of nature, a Muse (note
the distinction from epos, where the Muse speaks through the
poet) , a personal friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction,
or a natural object. The lyric is, as Stephen Dedalus says in Joyce’s
Portrait, the poet presenting the image in relation to himself: it is
to epos, rhetorically, as prayer is to sermon. The radical of presenta-
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
tion in the lyric is the hypothetical form of what in religion is
called the “I-Thou” relationship. The poet, so to speak, turns his
back on his listeners, though he may speak for them, and though
they may repeat some of his words after him.
Epos and fiction make up the central area of literature, and are
flanked by the drama on one side and by the lyric on the other.
Drama has a peculiarly intimate connection with ritual, and lyric
with dream or vision, the individual communing with himself. We
said at the beginning of this book that there is no such thing as
direct address in literature, but direct address is natural communi-
cation, and literature may imitate it as it may imitate anything
else in nature. In epos, where the poet faces his audience, we have a
mimesis of direct address. Epos and fiction first take the form of
scripture and myth, then of traditional tales, then of narrative and
didactic poetry, including the epic proper, and of oratorical prose,
then of novels and other written forms. As we progress historically
through the five modes, fiction increasingly overshadows epos, and
as it does, the mimesis of direct address changes to a mimesis of
assertive writing. This in its turn, with the extremes of documentary
or didactic prose, becomes actual assertion, and so passes out of
literature.
The lyric is an internal mimesis of sound and imagery, and stands
opposite the external mimesis, or outward representation of sound
and imagery, which is drama. Both forms avoid the mimesis of
direct address. The characters in a play talk to each other, and are
theoretically talking to themselves in an aside or soliloquy. Even
if they are conscious of an audience, they are not speaking for the
poet, except in special cases like the parabasis of Old Comedy or
the prologues and epilogues of the rococo theatre, where there is an
actual generic change from drama to epos. In Bernard Shaw the
comic parabasis is transferred from the middle of the play to a
separate prose preface, which is a change from drama to fiction.
In epos some kind of comparatively regular metre tends to pre-
dominate: even oratorical prose shows many metrical features, both
in its syntax and in its punctuation. In fiction prose tends to pre-
dominate, because only prose has the continuous rhythm appropri-
ate for the continuous form of the book. Drama has no controlling
rhythm peculiar to itself, but it is most closely related to epos in
the earlier modes and to fiction in the later ones. In the lyric a
rhythm which is poetic but not necessarily metrical tends to pre-
250
THEORY OF GENRES
dominate. We proceed to examine each genre in turn with a view
to discovering what its chief features are. As in what immediately
follows we are largely concerned with diction and linguistic ele-
ments, we must limit our survey mainly to a specific language,
which will be English: this means that a good deal of what we say
will be true only of English, but it is hoped that the main prin-
ciples can be adapted to other languages as well.
THE RHYTHM OF RECURRENCE: EPOS
The regular pulsating metre that traditionally distinguishes verse
from prose tends to become the organizing rhythm in epos or ex-
tended oratorical forms. Metre is an aspect of recurrence, and the
two words for recurrence, rhythm and pattern, show that recurrence
is a structural principle of all art, whether temporal or spatial in
its primary impact. Besides metre itself, quantity and accent (or
stress) are elements in poetic recurrence, though quantity is not
an element of regular recurrence in modern English, except in ex-
periments in which the poet has to make up his own rules as he
goes along. The relation of accent or stress to metre needs, perhaps,
a different kind of explanation from what is usually given it.
A four-stress line seems to be inherent in the structure of the
English language. It is the prevailing rhythm of the earlier poetry,
though it changes its scheme from alliteration to rhyme in Middle
English; it is the common rhythm of popular poetry in all periods,
of ballads and of most nursery rhymes. In the ballad, the eight-
six-eight-six quatrain is a continuous four-beat line, with a 'Test"
at the end of every other line. This principle of the rest, or a beat
coming at a point of actual silence, was already established in Old
English. The iambic pentameter provides a field of syncopation
in which stress and metre can to some extent neutralize one an-
other. If we read many iambic pentameters "naturally," giving
the important words the heavy accent that they do have in spoken
English, the old four-stress line stands out in clear relief against
its metrical background. Thus:
To b6, or n6t to be: that is the question.
Whether Tis ndbler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fbrtune.
Or take up arms against a sea of trdubles . . .
251
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mdrtal taste
Brought death into the world and all our w6e,
With 16ss of fiden, till one greater Man
Restdre us, and regain the blissful seat . . .
The stopped couplet of Dryden and Pope, as we should expect, has
a higher percentage of five-stress lines, but any rhythmical license
such as a feminine caesura is likely to bring back the old beat:
Forget their hatred, and consent to fear. (Waller)
Nor hen a fury, like a w6man scorn'd. (Congreve)
A little learning is a dangerous thing. (Pope)
Any period of metrical uncertainty or transition will illustrate
the native strength of the four-stress line^ After the death of Chau-
cer and the change from middle to modern English, we find our-
selves in the strange metrical world of Lydgate, in which we are
strongly tempted to apply to Lydgate himself what the Minstrel
says to Death in the Danse Macabre:
This newe daunce / is to me so straunge
Wonder dyverse / and passyngli contrarie
The dredful fot}mge / doth so ofte chaunge
And the mesures / so ofte sithes varie.
But there is a dance there all the same: let us look at the preceding
stanza. Death's speech to the Minstrel:
J J I
O thow Minstral / that cannest so note & pipe
J jijif 1/1 .nu
Un-to folkes / for to do plesaunce
/I J I J. /I /iij<
By the right honde (anoone) I shal the gripe
J J IJl/ il/l J^l J
With these other / to go vp-on my daunce
252
THEORY OF GENRES
j t ifirjij.
Ther is no scape / nowther a-voydaunce
J JlJ
On no side / to contrarie my sentence
i>ij Ji j. .^1 ill j.
For yn musik / be crafte & accordaunce
J JI J JI J jij J
Who maister is / shew his science.
This stanza will give us a bad time if we try to analyze it as a
pentameter stanza of Chaucer's ABC type: the last line, for in-
stance, is not a pentameter at all. Read as a continuous four-beat
line, it is fairly simple; and such a reading will bring out what the
prosodic analysis could never do, the grotesque, leaping-skeleton
lilt of the voice of Death ending in the measured irony of the last
line. I do not claim to know the details of Lydgate's prosody, what
e's he might have preferred to pronounce or elide or what foreign
words he might have accented differently. It is possible that neither
Lydgate nor the fifteenth-century reader was entirely clear on all
such points either; but a line with four main stresses and a variable
number of syllables between the stresses is the obvious device for
getting over such problems, as a good deal can be left to the in-
dividual reader's choice. In any case I am not indicating how the
passage is to be read so much as how it may most easily be scanned:
as with metrical scansion, every reader will make his own modifica-
tion of the pattern.
The ''Skeltonic" line is also usually a four-beat line: the spirited
prelude to Philip Sparowe is a quick-march rhythm, with more rests
and more accented beats coming close together than we found in
Lydgate:
J J J >
Pla ce bo,
n J J*
Who is there, who?
253
FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
j
Di le xi,
j nj^
Dame Margery;
J J J J
Fa, re, my, my,
J r] J J
Wlierefore and why, why?
/I n r]
For the sowle of Philip Sparowe,
n 1 nn
That was late slayn at Carowe . .
In short, the ''new principle'' on which Coleridge constructed
Christabel was about as new as principles usually are in literature.
It is clear too that the Finnish inspiration of Hiawatha was no more
fundamentally exotic than such inspirations usually are. Hiawatha
fits the four-stress pattern of English very snugly, which explains
perhaps why it is one of the easiest poems in the language to
parody. Meredith's Love in the Valley, also, is most easily scanned
as a four-stress line very similar in its rhythmical make-up to Lyd-
gate's:
n J jm jii J J
Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward
J nij. J>| .ni J
Couched with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly.
^54
THEORY OF GENRES
j.^i J j\n r}\j
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
These examples have, perhaps, begun to illustrate already some-
thing of what the word ''musical,” Aristotle's melos^ really means
as a term in modern literary criticism. In the music contemporary
with English poetry since Lydgate's time, we have had almost uni-
formly a stress accent, the stresses marking rhythmical units (meas-
ures) within which a variable number of notes is permitted. When
in poetry we have a predominating stress accent and a variable num-
ber of syllables between two stresses (usually four stresses to a line,
corresponding to "common time” in music), we have musical po-
etry, that is, poetry which resembles in its structure the music con-
temporary with it. We are speaking now of epos or extended poetry
in a continuous metre: the music most closely analogous to such
poetry is music in its more extended instrumental forms, in which
the organizing rhythm has descended more directly from dance
than from song.
This technical use of the word musical is very different from the
sentimental fashion of calling any poetry musical if it sounds nice.
In practice the technical and the sentimental uses are often directly
opposed, as the sentimental term would be applied to, for example,
Tennyson, and withdrawn from, for example. Browning. Yet if we
ask the external but relevant question: "W^ich of these two poets
knew more about music, and was a priori more likely to be influ-
enced by it? the answer is certainly not Tennyson. Here is a passage
from Tennyson's Oenone:
O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
I waited underneath the dawning hills.
Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark.
And dewy dark aloft the mountain pine:
Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,
Leading a jet-black goat white-horn'd, white-hooved.
Came up from reedy Simois all alone.
And here is a passage from Browning's The Flight of the Duchess:
I could favour you with sundry touches
Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess
255
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
Heightened the mellowness of her cheek's yellowness
(To get on faster) until at last her
Cheek grew to be one master-plaster
Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse:
In short, she grew from scalp to udder
Just the object to make you shudder.
In the Browning passage speed is a positive factor: one has the
sense of a metronome beat. Tennyson has tried to minimize the
sense of movement; his passage should be read slowly and with
much dwelling on the vowels. Both passages repeat sounds ob-
trusively, but the repetitions in Tennyson are there to slow down
the advance of ideas, to compel the rhythm to return on itself, and
to elaborate what is essentially a pattern of sound. In Browning
the rhymes sharpen the accentuation of the beat and help to build
up a cumulative rhythm. The speed and the sharp accent in Brown-
ing's poetry are musical features in it, and it is difficult to see what
the words in parentheses can be except a musical direction, an Eng-
lish translation of piti mosso.
Such phrases as '‘smooth musical flow" or “harsh unmusical dic-
tion" belong to the sentimental use of the word musical, and are
perhaps derived from the fact that the word “harmony" in ordi-
nary English, apart from music, means a stable and permanent re-
lationship. In this figurative sense of the word harmony, music is
not a sequence of harmonies at all, but a sequence of discords end-
ing in a harmony, the only stable and permanent “harmony" in
music being the final resolving tonic chord. It is more likely to be
the harsh, rugged, dissonant poem (assuming of course some tech-
nical competence in the poet) that will show in poetry the tension
and the driving accented impetus of music. When we find a careful
balancing of vowels and consonants and a dreamy sensuous flow of
sound, we are probably dealing with an unmusical poet. Pope,
Keats, and Tennyson are all unmusical. This term, I need hardly
observe, is not pejorative: The Rape of the Lock is unmusical, just
as it is a bad example of blank verse, because it is something else
altogether. When we find sharp barking accents, crabbed and ob-
scure language, mouthfuls of consonants, and long lumbering poly-
syllables, we are probably dealing with melos, or poetry which shows
an analogy to music, if not an actual influence from it.
The musical diction is better fitted for the grotesque and hor-
256
THEORY OF GENRES
rible, or for invective and abuse. It is congenial to a gnarled intel-
lectualism of the so-called ''metaphysicar' type. It is irregular in
metre (because of the syncopation against stress), leans heavily
on enjambement, and employs a long cumulative rhythm sweeping
the lines up into larger rhythmical units such as the paragraph. The
fact that Shakespeare shows an increasing use of melos as he goes
on is the principle employed for dating his plays on internal evi-
dence. When Milton says that rhymed heroic verse is '"of no true
musical delight,'' because musical poetry must have “the sense
variously drawn out from one verse into another," he is using the
word musical in its technical sense. When Samuel Johnson speaks
of “the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse
to verse," he is speaking from his own consistently anti-musical
point of view. The Heretic's Tragedy is a musical poem; Thyrsis is
not. The Jolly Beggars is; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is not. Pope's
Messiah is not musical, but Smart's Song to David, with its pound-
ing thematic words and the fortissimo explosion of its coda, is a
musical tour de force. Crashaw's hymns and Cowley's Pindarics are
musical, with their fluent, variable, prevailingly four-stress lines and
their relentless pushing enjambement; Herbert's stanzaic poems
and Gray's Pindarics are not. Skelton, Wyatt, and Dunbar are mu-
sical; Gavin Douglas and Surrey are not. Alliterative verse is usu-
ally accentual and musical; elaborate stanza forms usually are not.
The use of melos in poetry does not, of course, necessarily imply
any technical knowledge of music on the part of the poet, but it
often goes with it. Such a technically musical poem as Crashaw's
Musicks Duell (a Baroque aria with instrumental accompaniment)
is an example.
And occasionally it is at least conceivable that some exposure
to music would have guided a tendency to melos in verse. One
feels that Southey, for instance, never quite clarified his remarkable
experiments in epos rhythm: if so, it may be instructive to set be-
side Milton's incisive list of the musical qualities of poetry the
stammer and mumble of the preface to Thalaba: “I do not wish
the improvisator^ tune;— -but something that denotes the sense of
harmony, something like the accent of feeling,— like the tone which
every poet necessarily gives to poetry." The conception of melos,
too, may throw more light on what Wordsworth was trying to do
in Peter Bell and The Idiot Boy. Wordsworth's remarks about
metre as the source of excitement in verse apply more particularly
^57
FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
to accent, in which the physical pulsation of the dance is present.
What metre in itself gives is rather the pleasure of seeing a rela-
tively predictable pattern filling up with the inevitably felicitous
words. Pope's ‘^What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed"
is a metrical conception: as we listen to his couplets, we have a
sense of fulfilled expectation which is the opposite of obviousness.
The greater violence in the imagery of Donne's satires is appropri-
ate to the greater energy of a more accentually-conceived rhythm.
If we turn to the contrasting group of what we have called the
unmusical poets, Spenser, Pope, Keats, Tennyson, we find slower
and more resonant rhythms. Four-stress lines are much rarer in The
Faerie Queene than in Paradise Lost, and the opposite tendency is
marked by the recurrent Alexandrine. The practice of this group
of poets is finely expressed by Johnson in his anti-musical dictum:
‘"The musick of the English heroic line strikes the ear so faintly
that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate
together; this co-operation can be obtained only by the preserva-
tion of every verse unmingled with another, as a distinct system
of sounds." The implication is that as the only musical elements
in poetry that Johnson is considering have been lost for good with
the loss of pitch accent and quantity, English poetry should think
in terms of sound-pattern rather than cumulative rhythm.
The relations between poetry and the visual arts are perhaps more
far-fetched than those between poetry and music. Unmusical poets
are often '‘pictorial" in a general sense: they frequently use their
more meditative rhythms to build up, detail by detail, a static pic-
ture, as in the careful description of the nude Venus in Oenone or
in the elaborate tapestry-like pageants in The Faerie Queene.
Where we do have something really analogous to opsis, however,
is in the rhetorical device known as imitative harmony or onomat-
opoeia, as described and exemplified by Pope in the Essay on Criti-
cism:
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense . . .
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain.
Flies o'er th' unbending com, and skims along the main.
258
THEORY OF GENRES
This device is easy to recognize, and has been remarked on ever
since Aristotle, in his treatise on rhetoric, illustrated in Homer's
line about the stone of Sisyphus the sound of a large stone rolling
downhill:
avrc9 CTretra 'ireSovSe KvXivdeTO Xaa? dvaiBiijs
Pope's translation renders this line ''Thunders impetuous down,
and smoaks along the ground," and won for once the approval of
Johnson, Johnson being in general very doubtful about imitative
harmony. He ridicules it in one of the Idler papers in the figure of
Dick Minim the critic, who points out that the words bubble and
trouble cause "a momentary inflation of the cheeks by the reten-
tion of the breath, which is afterwards forcibly emitted, as in the
practice of blowing bubbles." All that the ridicule really illustrates,
however, is that onomatopoeia is a linguistic as well as a poetic
tendency, and that the poet takes advantage of whatever his lan-
guage offers as a matter of course. The English language has many
excellent sound-effects, though it has lost a few: in Old English
The Wanderer can express cold weather as a modern poem cannot:
Hreosan hrim ond snaw hagle gemenged
But because such devices are linguistic as well as literary, they are
continually being recreated in colloquial speech. Colloquial speech,
when good, is frequently called "picturesque" or "colorful," both
words being pictorial metaphors. The narrative passages of Huckle-
berry Finn have an imitative flexibility about them that the nar-
rative passages of Tom Sawyer, for instance, hardly attain to:
. . . Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing,
and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll
in like a wave.
The most remarkably sustained mastery of verbal opsis in Eng-
lish, perhaps, is exhibited in The Faerie Queene, which we have to
read with a special kind of attention, an ability to catch visualiza-
tion through sound. Thus in
The Eugh obedient to the bender's will,
the line has a number of weak syllables in the middle that makes it
sag out in a bow shape. When Una goes astray the rhythm goes
astray with her:
FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
And Una wandring farre in woods and forrests . . .
Part of the effect of this line is due to the weak rhyme of ''forrests'"
against "guests." When the subject is wreckage, the rhythm is
wrecked with the same kind of disappointment-rhyme:
For else my feeble vessell crazd, and crackt
Through thy strong buffets and outrageous blowes,
Cannot endure, but needs it must be wrackt
On the rough rocks, or on the sandy shallowes.
When Florimell finds her way dilEcult to scan, so does the reader:
Through the tops of the high trees she did descry . . .
When the subject is harmony in music, we have an identical rhyme
on one of the few appropriate words in the language:
To th" instruments diuine respondence meet:
The siluer sounding instruments did meet . . .
When the subject is a "perillous Bridge," we have:
Streight was the passage like a ploughed ridge.
That if two met, the one mote needes fall ouer the lidge.
Renaissance readers had been put on the alert for such effects by
their school training in rhetoric: a harmless looking line from
Spenser's January, for instance, is promptly sandbagged by E. K. as
"a prety Epanorthosis . . . and withall a Paronomasia." The source
of Pope’s passage quoted above is Vida's Art of Poetry, which is
earlier than Spenser. After Spenser the poet who showed the most
consistent— or persistent— interest in imitative harmony was Cow-
ley, who uses it so freely in Davideis as to draw a hoarse growl from
Johnson that he saw no reason why a pine tree should be taller in
Alexandrines than in pentameters. Some of Cowley's effects how-
ever are interesting enough, such as his use of the oracular hemi-
stich. Here, for instance, three feet of a pentameter line are assigned
to silent contemplation:
0 who shall tell, who shall describe thy Throne,
Thou great Three-One?
The first line in the passage quoted from Pope ("'Tis not
enough no harshness gives offence") implies that a sharp discord
or apparent bungle in the writing may often be interpreted as imita-
260
THEORY OF GENRES
tive decorum. Pope uses such intentional discords in the same poem
when he gives horrible examples of practices he disapproves of, and
Addison's discussion of the passage in Spectator 253 shows how
lively an interest such devices still aroused. Here, for example, is
the way that Pope describes constipated genius:
And strains, from hard-bound brains, eight lines a year.
Spenser, naturally, employs the same device constantly. A tasteless
misuse of alliteration marks a speaker (Braggadocchio) as a liar
and hypocrite:
But minds of mortall men are muchell mard,
And mou’d amisse with massie mucks vnmeet regard.
and when the false Duessa tempts St. George, the grammar,
rhythm, and assonance could hardly be worse: the worthy knight's
ear should have warned him that all was not well:
Yet thus perforce he bids me do, or die.
Die is my dew; yet rew my wretched state
You . . .
Certain imitative devices become standardized in every language,
and most of them in English are too familiar to need recapitula-
tion here: beheaded lines increase speed, trochaic rhythms suggest
falling rfiovement, and so on. The native stock of English words
consists largely of monosyllables, and a monosyllable always de-
mands a separate accent, however slight., Hence long Latin words,
if skilfully used, have the rhythmical function of lightening the
metre, in contrast to the sodden unrhythmical roar that results
''When ten low words oft creep in one dull line." A by-product of
this latter phenomenon in English is more useful: the so-called
broken-backed line with a spondee in the middle has since Old
English times (when it was Sievers' type C) been most effective
for suggesting the ominous and foreboding:
Thy wishes then dare not be told. (Wyatt)
Depending from on high, dreadful to sight. (Spenser)
Which tasted works knowledge of good and evil. (Milton)
Imitative harmony may of course be employed occasionally in
any form of writing, but as a continuous effect it seems to adhere
261
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
most naturally to epos in verse, where it takes the form of variants
from a sustained normal pattern. Dramatists and prose writers use it
very sparingly: in Shakespeare it occurs only for some definite rea-
son, as when Lear calls to the storm on the heath in the accents
of the storm itself. In lyrics its introduction has the effect of a
tour de force which absorbs most of the interest and turns the poem
into an epigram. An example is the brilliant little fourteenth-cen-
tury poem The Blacksmiths, which uses the alliterative line to rep-
resent hammering:
Swarte smekyd smethes smateryd v^th smoke
Dryue me to deth wyth den of here dyntes . . .
Recurrently in the history of rhetoric some theory of a ^'natural''
relation between sound and sense turns up. It is unlikely that there
is any such natural relation, but that there is an onomatopoeic
element in language which is developed and exploited by the poet
is obvious enough. It is simpler to think rather of imitative harmony
as a special application of a rhetorical feature which is analogous to
Classical quantity, but would be better described as "'quality'': the
patterns of assonance made by vowels and consonants. It is not
difficult to distinguish epos with a continuous "quality” or sound-
pattern, such as Hyperion, from the epos of, say. Red Cotton Night-
cap Country, where the sound exists primarily for the sake of the
sense, and is consequently felt to be closer to prose. We have an
indication that there is no consistent sound-pattern when there are
two equally satisfactory versions of the same poem differing in tex-
ture, as in the Prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women,
The main reason for the confused use of the term musical in
literary criticism is that when critics think of music in poetry, they
seldom think of the actual music contemporary with the poetry
they are discussing, with its stress accent and dance rhythm, but
of the (very largely unknown) structure of Classical music, which
was presumably closer to song and to pitch accent. We have stressed
imitative harmony because it illustrates the principle that while in
Classical poetry sound-pattern or quantity, being an element of
recurrence, is part of the melos of the poetry, it is part of the opsis
in ours.
262
THEORY OF GENRES
THE RHYTHM OF CONTINUITY: PROSE
In every poem we can hear at least two distinct rhythms. One is
the recurring rhythm, which we have shown to be a complex of
accent, metre, and sound-pattern. The other is the semantic rhythm
of sense, or what is usually felt to be the prose rhythm. Exaggerat-
ing the former, in speaking poetry aloud, will produce sing-song;
exaggerating the latter will produce “insanely pompous prose,” to
quote a remark of Bernard Shaw on the speaking of Shakespeare
in his day. We have verse epos when the recurrent rhythm is the
primary or organizing one, and prose when the semantic rhythm is
primary. Literary prose results from the use within literature of the
form used for discursive or assertive writing. Treatises in verse,
however “unpoetical,” are invariably classified as literary.
The sixteenth century was a period of experiment, mainly in
verse epos or running rhythm, to use Hopkins's term. The influ-
ence of melos developed blank verse; the influence of opsis the
Spenserian stanza and Drayton's hexameter (the fact that Polyol-
bion is a descriptive poem may account for Drayton's choice of this
metre). As in all experimental periods, there were some compara-
tive failures, such as poulterer's measure, which had a vogue and
were then dropped. Prose epoSy that is, prose which is conceived
primarily as oratorical prose, reflects the cultural domination of epos:
it is normally thought of as a subsidiary form of spoken expression,
of which the highest form is verse. It is assigned to the low or at
best the middle style, such metaphors as Milton's “sitting here be-
low in the cool element of prose” being typical. Hence any attempt
to give literary dignity to prose is likely to give it some of the char-
acteristics of verse.
Jeremy Bentham is reputed to have distinguished prose from
verse by the fact that in prose all the lines run to the end of the
page. Like many simple-minded observations, this has a truth that
the myopia of knowledgeability is more apt to overlook. The rhythm
of prose is continuous, not recurrent, and the fact is symbolized by
the purely mechanical breaking of prose lines on a printed page.
Of course every prose writer knows that the writing of prose is not
as mechanical as the printing of it, and that it is possible for print-
ing to injure or even spoil the rhythm of a sentence by putting an
emphatic word at the end of a line instead of at the beginning of
the next one, by hyphenating a strongly stressed word, and so on.
263
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
But the prose writer is largely the prisoner of his luck, unless he is
willing to make the kind of revolt against luck illustrated by Mal-
larm^'s Coup des Des. The characteristics of Renaissance oratorical
prose, with the many recurrent features in its rhythm, are often
concealed by the continuous printing of typography. The antiphonal
chant in which the character books are written is a good example.
He distastes religion as a sad thing,
and is six years elder for a thought of heaven.
He scorns and fears, and yet hopes for old age,
but dare not imagine it with wrinkles . . .
He offers you his blood today in kindness,
and is ready to take yours tomorrow.
He does seldom anything which he wishes not to do again,
and is only wise after a misfortune . . .
Euphuism, again, employs every device known to the rhetoric
books, including rhyme, metrical balance, and alliteration, which
are usually thought of as the prerogative of verse. Ciceronian prose
was based on a periodic rhythm and a balancing of clauses that was
often a quasi-metrical balance. In prose works which are deliberate
rhetorical exercises, such as Browne's Urn Burial, one can pick out
recurring units of rhythm like the clausulae of Cicero: ‘^handsome
enclosure in glasses," ''revengeful contentions of Rome," are anapes-
tic examples. The 1611 Bible is frequently printed with each verse
a separate paragraph: this is doubtless done primarily for the con-
venience of preachers, but it also gives a clearer idea of its prose
rhythm than conventionally printed prose would do. The rhythm
of some of Bacon's essays, especially the earlier and more aphoristic
ones, would also emerge more clearly if each sentence were a sepa-
rate paragraph.
By the seventeenth century the period of experiment in running
rhythm had run its course, and a period of experiment in prose suc-
ceeded. This begins with the "Senecan amble" or Attic prose, the
revolt in the direction of a natural speaking style against the formal
half-metrical rhetoric of the Ciceronians. In Dryden the emancipat-
ing of prose from the domination of metre and the liberating of
the distinctive semantic rhythm of prose is an accomplished fact.
Thus Matthew Arnold was right in calling the period of Dryden
and Pope an age of prose and reason, not because its poetry is pro-
264
THEORY OF GENRES
saic, but because its prose is fully realized prose. One of the curious
facts of literary history is that M. Jourdain's celebrated discovery
in fact is a discovery, and one that a literature seems most often to
make at a well advanced point in its development.
In saying that the distinctive rhythm of prose emerges more clearly
from Dryden's time on, we are not, of course, saying that better prose
was then written, though perhaps the reader needs no further warn-
ings against premature value-judgements. But it becomes obvious
that prose by itself is a transparent medium: it is at its purest— that
is, at its furthest from epos and other metrical influences— when it is
least obtrusive and presents its subject-matter like plate glass in
a shop window. It goes without saying that such neutral clarity is
far from dullness, as dullness is invariably opaque. Hence, while
there is no literary reason why prose should not be as rhetorical as
the writer pleases, rhetorical prose often becomes a disadvantage
when prose is used for non-literary purposes. Something of this is
expressed by the remark that it is impossible to tell the truth in
Macaulay's style— not that Macaulay is the best writer to attach
the remark to. A highly mannered prose is not sufficiently flexible
to do the purely descriptive work of prose: it continually oversim-
plifies and over-symmetrizes its material. Even Gibbon is not above
sacrificing a necessary qualification of a fact to an antithesis. Some-
thing of the same principle can be seen within literature itself: in
studying the euphuist romances, for example, one becomes aware
of how difficult it is to get a story told in euphuist prose. Euphuism
grew out of oratorical forms, and remains best adapted to harangue:
the euphuist writer seizes every chance for relapsing into monologue
that he can get.
Rhetorical prose, in short, is naturally best adapted to the two
purposes of rhetoric, ornament and persuasion. But as these two
purposes are a psychological contrast, persuasive prose is often neu-
tralized in its effect by the very ornament that makes it delightfully
persuasive. The beauty of Jeremy Taylor's devotional writing is a
disinterested factor in it which has kept him in the permanent con-
fines of literature instead of in the transient stream of kinetic per-
suasion. The principle involved is by no means confined to Taylor:
even in the Anglo-Saxon congregation of Wulfstan there must have
been a few secular-minded highbrows who were thinking less of
their sins than of the preacher's mastery of alliterative rhythm:
265
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
Her syndan mannslagan ond maegslagan ond maesserbanan ond
mynsterhatan, ond her syndan mansworan ond morthorwyrhtan,
ond her syndan myltestran ond bearnmyrthran ond fule forlegene
horingas manege, ond her syndan wiccan ond waelcyrian, ond
her syndan ryperas ond reaferas ond worolstruderas, ond, hraedest
is to cwethenne, mana ond misdaeda ungerim ealra.
We are concerned here with literary prose: an account of non-
literary prose rhythm will be given later in the essay. A tendency
to long sentences made up of short phrases and coordinate clauses,
to emphatic repetition combined with a driving linear rhythm, to
invective, to exhaustive catalogues, and to expressing the process
or movement of thought instead of the logical word-order of
achieved thought, are among the signs of prose melos. Rabelais
is one of the greatest masters of melos in prose: the wonderful
drinking party in the fifth chapter of the first book seems to me to
be technically musical, Jannequin set to words, so to speak. In Eng-
lish we have Burton, who is said to have amused himself by going
down to the Isis and listening to the bargemen swear. Perhaps his
visits were professional, for the qualities of his style are essentially
the qualities of good swearing: a swinging sense of rhythm, a love
of invective and of catalogue, an unlimited vocabulary, a tendency
to think in short accentual units, and an encyclopaedic knowledge
of the two subjects relevant to swearing, theology and personal hy-
giene. All of these except the last are musical characteristics.
The prose of Milton, like his verse, is at its best full of 'True musi-
cal delight,’' though of course of a very different kind. The enor-
mous periodic sentences with their short barking phrases, the varia-
tions of speed within these sentences, the rhetorical accumulation
of emotionally charged epithets, the roaring Beethovenish-coda
perorations, are some of its features. Sterne, however, is the chief
master of prose melos before the development of ‘'stream of con-
sciousness” techniques for presenting thought as a process revived
it in our own day. In Proust this technique takes the form of a
Wagnerian intertwining of leitmotifs. In Gertrude Stein a deliber-
ate prolixity of language gives to the words something of the capac-
ity for repetition that music has. But it is of course Joyce who has
made the most elaborate experiments in melos, and the bar-room
scene in Ulysses (the one called "Sirens” in the Stuart Gilbert
commentary) is, if somewhat acrobatic, still good evidence that the
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THEORY OF GENRES
prose techniques just discussed have an analogy to music which is
not purely fanciful. The analogy is accepted in Wyndham Lewis,
for example, whose Men Without Art is evidently intended as a
manifesto in favor of opsis. Here and there we can discern a tend-
ency to melos even in normally unmusical writers. When in the
rhetoric of Sartor Resartus, for instance, we run across such a pas-
sage as 'Trom amid these confused masses of Eulogy and Elegy,
with their mad Petrarchan and Werterean ware lying madly scat-
tered among all sorts of quite extraneous matter,'' we can see that
some of the devices of euphuism are being used for linear accentua-
tion instead of for parallel balance, as they would be in actual
euphuism.
In prose, as in verse, the writers most frequently called musical
in the sentimental sense are usually the ones most remote from
actual music. The tendency to opsis in De Quincey, Pater, Ruskin,
and Morris, to name a few at random, often includes a tendency
to elaborate pictorial description and long decorative similes, but
the second tendency does not define the first: we cannot judge a
quality of style by choice of subject-matter. The real difference is
rather in the conception of the sentence. The long sentences in
the later novels of Henry James are containing sentences: all the
qualifications and parentheses are fitted in to a pattern, and as one
point after another is made, there emerges not a linear process of
thought but a simultaneous comprehension. What is explained is
turned around and viewed from all aspects, but it is completely
there, so to speak, from the beginning. In Conrad, too, the disloca-
tions in the narrative— working backwards and forwards, as he put
it— are designed to make us shift our attention from listening to
the story to looking at the central situation. His phrase ''above all
to make you see" contains a visual metaphor with much of its
original meaning left in it. The dislocations of narrative in Tristram
Shandy have the opposite effect: they take our attention away from
looking at the external situation to listening to the process of its
coming into being in the author's mind.
As prose is by itself a transparent medium, relatively few prose
writers show a pronounced leaning to one side or the other. In gen-
eral, when we are most conscious of a marked "style," or rhetori-
cal idiosyncrasy of verbal structure, we are most likely to be in
contact with either melos or opsis. Browne and Jeremy Taylor are
as much inclined to opsis as Burton and Milton are to melos: the
FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
comment on Taylor made by a character in an O. Henry story,
"'Why doesn't someone write words to it?", refers to something
analogous, not to music, but to a Tennysonian sound-pattern.
One may perhaps risk the generalization that the main weight
of Classical influence falls on the opsis side, for the reason that an
inflected language permits greater freedom in word order than
Modern English or French, and so one tends to think of the sen-
tence as containing all its parts at once. Even in Cicero, who is
an orator, we are intensely aware of "balance," and balance im-
plies a neutralizing of linear movement. In later Latin a new kind
of linear propulsion begins to be perceptible, and one feels closer
to the new Teutonic civilization with its alliterative line and its
embryonic stress-accent music. Thus in Cassiodorus thematic words
and alliterative accents echo and call and respond through the
turgid sentences:
Hinc etiam appellatam aestimamus chordam, quod facile corda
moveat: ubi tenta vocum collecta est sub diversitate concordia,
ut vicina chorda pulsata alteram faciat sponte contremiscere,
quam nullam contigit attigisse.
THE RHYTHM OF DECORUM: DRAMA
In all literary structures we are aware of a quality that we may
call the quality of a verbal personality or a speaking voice— some-
thing different from direct address, though related to it. When this
quality is felt to be the voice of the author himself, we call it style:
le style c'est Vhomme is a generally accepted axiom. The conception
of style is based on the fact that every writer has his own rhythm,
as distinctive as his handwriting, and his own imagery, ranging
from a preference for certain vowels and consonants to a preoccu-
pation with two or three archetypes. Style exists in all literature,
of course, but may be seen at its purest in thematic prose: in fact
it is the chief literary term applied to works of prose generally
classified as non-literary. Style had its great period in late Victorian
times, when the primary connection between writing and personal-
ity was a fundamental principle of criticism.
In a novel we are aware of a more complicated problem: dialogue
has to speak with the voice of the internal characters, not the au-
thor, and sometimes dialogue and narrative are so far apart as to
divide the book into two different languages. The suiting of style
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THEORY OF GENRES
to an internal character or subject is known as decorum or ap-
propriateness of style to content. Decorum is in general the poet's
ethical voice, the modification of his own voice to the voice of a
character or to the vocal tone demanded by subject or mood. And
as style is at its purest in discursive prose, so decorum is obviously
at its purest in drama, where the poet does not appear in person.
Drama might be described, from our present point of view, as epos
or fiction absorbed by decorum.
Drama is a mimesis of dialogue or conversation, and the rhetoric
of conversation obviously has to be a very fluid one. It may range
from a set speech to the kind of thrust and parry which is called
stichomythia when its basis is metrical; and it has the double dif-
ficulty of expressing the speaker's character and speech rhythm
and yet modifying them to the situation and the moods of other
speakers. In Elizabethan drama the center of gravity, so to speak,
is somewhere between verse epos and prose, so that it can move
easily from one to the other depending on the requirements of
decorum, which are chiefly the social rank of the character and
the genre of the play. Comedy and lower ranks run to prose, and
in later centuries, as epos gives way before fiction, comedy and
prose exhibit a power of adaptation to the changed conditions that
tragedy and verse epos conspicuously lack.
Yet even in prose comedy, where the lofty style of rhetoric de-
manded by ruling-class figures has largely disappeared, there still
remains the technical problem of representing in prose the features
that a verse drama would express by verse: such features as dignity,
passion, witty imagery (probably the most important), and pathos.
Prose comedy often meets such requirements by developing a man-
nered epigrammatic prose style, in which something of the antitheti-
cal and repetitive structure of rhetorical prose reappears. Nearly all
the great writers of English comedy from Congreve to O'Casey
have been Irishmen, and the rhetorical tradition survived longer in
Ireland. The dramatic prose of Synge also ranks as literary man-
nerism, even if it does reproduce the speech rhythms of Irish peas-
antry. By contrast a verse rhythm like that of Browning in the nine-
teenth century or that of Eliot and Fry in this one seems to straddle
the gap between epos and prose with much less effort. One wonders
if there is not something to be said for Shaw's contention that it is
actually easier to write a play in blank verse than in prose. The
feeling of unnaturalness and strain in a good deal of modern verse
26g
FOURTH ESSAY; RHETORICAL CRITICISM
drama would in that case be the result of attempting an inappropri-
ate hind of rhetoric, one which is too far out of touch with normal
conversational rhythms, in a way that Elizabethan drama, however
elaborately stylized, very seldom is.
The attempt to find verse forms for conversational rhythms did
not interest very many of the Romantics or Victorians. Students
of English are often urged, in Romantic fashion, to use as many
short words of native origin as possible, on the ground that they
make one’s vocabulary concrete, but a style founded on simple na-
tive words can be the most artificial of all styles. Samuel Johnson
at his most bumbling is still colloquial and conversational com-
pared to a William Morris romance. Standard educated English
speech today, with its many long abstract and technical words and
the heavy accent of its short ones, is a polysyllabic clatter which
is much easier to fit to prose than to verse. Blake’s Prophetic Books
represent one of the few successful eftorts to tackle conversational
rhythm in verse— so successful that many critics are still wondering
if they are “real poetry.” Blake’s view that a longer line than the
pentameter was needed to represent educated colloquial speech in
verse may be compared with the experiments of Clough and Bridges
in hexameters, which are also attempts to capture the same kind of
rhythm, though at least in Clough one feels that a strict adherence
to the metre gives a somewhat roller-coaster quality to the accent.
In the verse rhythm of The Cocktail Party, which perhaps most
clearly foreshadows the development of a new rhythmical center
of gravity between verse and prose in modern speech, we go back
to a rhythm very close to the old four-accent line. Perhaps what is
ta kin g shape here is a long six-or-seven-beat accentual line finally
made practicable for spoken dialogue by being split in two.
'The question of melos and opsis in drama is easily dealt with:
melos is actual music and opsis visible scenery and costume.
THE RHYTHM OF ASSOCIATION: LYRIC
In the historical sequence of modes, each genre in turn seems to
rise to some degree of ascendancy. Myth and romance express them-
selves mainly in epos, and in the high mimetic the rise of a new
national consciousness and an increase of secular rhetoric bring
the drama of the settled theatre into the foreground. The low
mimetic brings fiction and an increasing use of prose, the rhythm
270
THEORY OF GENRES
of which finally begins to influence verse. Wordsworth's theory
that apart from metre the lexis of poetry and of prose are identical
is a low mimetic manifesto. The lyric is the genre in which the
poet, like the ironic writer, turns his back on his audience. It is
also the genre which most clearly shows the hypothetical core of
literature, narrative and meaning in their literal aspects as word-
order and word-pattern. It looks as though the lyric genre has some
peculiarly close connection with the ironic mode and the literal
level of meaning.
Let us take a line of poetry at random, say the beginning of Clau-
dio's great speech in Measure for Measure:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where:
We can hear of course the metrical rhythm, an iambic pentameter
spoken as a four-stress line. We can hear the semantic or prose
rhythm, and we hear what we may call the rhythm of decorum,
the verbal representation of the horror of a man facing death. But
we can also, if we listen to the line very attentively, make out still
another rhythm in it, an oracular, meditative, irregular, unpredict-
able, and essentially discontinuous rhythm, emerging from the
coincidences of the sound-pattern:
Ay:
But to die . . .
and go
we know
not where . . .
Just as the semantic rhythm is the initiative of prose, and as the
metrical rhythm is the initiative of epos, so this oracular rhythm
seems to be the predominating initiative of lyric. The initiative of
prose normally has its center of gravity in the conscious mind; the
discursive writer writes deliberately, and the literary prose writer
imitates a deliberative process. In verse epos the choice of a metre
prescribes the form of rhetorical organization: the poet develops an
unconscious habitual skill in thinking in this metre, and is thereby
set free to do other things, such as tell stories, expound ideas, or
make the various modifications demanded by decorum. Neither of
these by itself seems quite to get down to what we think of as
typically the poetic creation, which is an associative rhetorical proc-
ess, most of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of
271
FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
paronomasia, sound-links, ambiguous sense-links, and memory-links
very like that of the dream. Out of this the distinctively lyrical
union of sound and sense emerges. Like the dream, verbal associa-
tion is subject to a censor, which (or whom) we may call the
^'plausibility-principle,'' the necessity of shaping itself into a form
acceptable to the poet's and his reader's waking consciousness, and
of adapting itself to the sign-meanings of assertive language well
enough to be communicable to that consciousness. But associative
rhythm seems to retain a connection with dream corresponding to
the drama’s connection with ritual. The associative rhythm, no less
than the others, can be found in all writing: Yeats's typographical
rearrangement of Pater which begins The Oxford Book of Modern
Verse illustrates how it may be extracted from prose.
The most natural unit of the lyric is the discontinuous unit of
the stanza, and in earlier periods most lyrics tended to he fairly
regular strophic patterns, reflecting the ascendancy of epos. Stanzaic
epos, such as we find in medieval romance, is usually much closer
to the atmosphere of a dream world than linear epos. With the
Romantic movement a sense that the "true voice of feeling" was
unpredictable and irregular in its rhythm began to increase. Poe's
Poetic Principle maintains that poetry is essentially oracular and
discontinuous, that the poetic is the lyrical, and that verse epos
consists really of lyrical passages stuck together with versified prose.
This is a manifesto of the ironic age, as Wordsworth's preface was
a low mimetic one, and announces the arrival of a third period of
technical experiment in English literature, in which the object is
to liberate the distinctive rhythm of lyric. The aim of "free" verse
is not simply revolt against metre and epos conventions, but the
articulation of an independent rhythm equally distinct from metre
and from prose. If we do not recognize this third rhythm, we shall
have no answer for the naive objection that when poetry loses
regular metre it becomes prose.
The loosening of rhyme in Emily Dickinson and of stanzaic struc-
ture in Yeats are intended, not to make the metrical pattern more
irregular, but to make the lyric rhythm more precise. Hopkins's
term "sprung rhythm," too, has as close an affinity with lyric as
running rhythm has with epos. Pound's theories and techniques,
from his early imagism to the discontinuous pastiche of the Cantos
(preceded by a half-century of French and English experiment in
the "fragmentation" or lyricizing of epos) , are lyric-centered theories
THEORY OF GENRES
and techniques. The rhetorical analysis founded on ambiguity in
new criticism is a lyric-centered criticism which tends, often ex-
plicitly, to extract the lyrical rhythm from all the genres. The most
admired and advanced poets of the twentieth century are chiefly
those who have most fully mastered the elusive, meditative, reso-
nant, centripetal word-magic of the emancipated lyrical rhythm.
In the course of this development the associative rhythm has be-
come more flexible, and has consequently moved from its Romantic
basis in style to a new kind of subjectivized decorum.
The traditional associations of lyric are chiefly with music. The
Greeks spoke of lyrics as ta mele, usually translated as ''poems to
be sung''; in the Renaissance, lyric was constantly associated with
the lyre and the lute, and Poe's essay just referred to lays an em-
phasis on the importance of music in poetry which makes up in
strength what it lacks in precision. We should remember, however,
that when a poem is ''sung," at least in the modern musical sense,
its rhythmical organization has been taken over by music. The
words of a "singable" lyric are generally neutral and conventional
words, and modern song has the stress accent of music, with little
if anything left of the pitch accent that marks the domination of
music by poetry. We should therefore get a clearer impression of
the lyric if we translated ta mele as "poems to be chanted," for
chanting, or what Yeats called cantillation, is an emphasis on words
as words. Modern poets who, like Yeats, want their poems chanted
are often precisely those who are most suspicious of musical set-
tings.
The history of music shows a recurrent tendency to develop
elaborate contrapuntal structures which, in vocal music, almost an-
nihilate the words. There has also been a recurrent tendency to
reform and simplify musical structures in order to give the words
more prominence. This has sometimes been the result of religious
pressure, but literary influences have been at work too. We may
take the madrigal, perhaps, as representing something close to a
limit of the subservience of poetry to music. In the madrigal the
poetic rhythm disappears as the words are tossed from voice to
voice, and the imagery in the words is expressed by the devices of
what is usually called program music. We may find long passages
filled up with nonsense words, or the whole collection may bear the
subtitle "apt for voices or viols,” indicating that the words can be
dispensed with altogether. The dislike of poets for this trituration of
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
their words can be seen in the support they gave to the seventeenth-
century style of isolating the words on a single melodic line, the style
which made the opera possible. This certainly brings us closer to
poetry, though music still predominates in the rhythm. But the
closer the composer moves toward emphasizing the verbal rhythm
of the poem, the closer he comes to the chanting which is the real
rhythmical basis of lyric. Henry Lawes made some experiments in
this direction which won the applause of Milton, and the admira-
tion that so many symbolistes expressed for Wagner was evidently
based on the notion (if so erroneous a notion can be said to be a
base) that he was also trying to identify, or at least closely associate,
the rhythm of music and the rhythm of poetry.
But now that we have music on one boundary of lyric, and the
purely verbal emphasis of cantillation in the center, we can see
that lyric has a relation to the pictorial on the other side which is
equally important. Something of this is present in the typographical
appearance of a lyric on a printed page, where it is, so to speak,
overseen as well as overheard. The arrangement of stanzas and in-
dentations gives a visible pattern to a lyric which is quite distinct
from epos, where the lines have approximately the same length, as
well as of course from prose. In any case there are thousands of
lyrics so intently focussed on visual imagery that they are, as we
may say, set to pictures. In the emblem an actual picture appears,
and the poet-painter Blake, whose engraved lyrics are in the emblem
tradition, has a role in the lyric analogous to that of the poet-com-
posers Campion and Dowland on the musical side. The movement
called imagism made a great deal of the pictorial element in the
lyric, and many imagistic poems could almost be described as a
series of captions to invisible pictures.
In such emblems as Herbert's The Altar and Easter Wings,
where the pictorial shape of the subject is suggested in the shape
of the lines of the poem, we begin to approach the pictorial bound-
ary of the lyric. The absorption of words by pictures, correspond-
ing to the madrigal's absorption of words by music, is picture-writ-
ing, of the kind most familiar to us in comic strips, captioned car-
toons, posters, and other emblematic forms. A further stage of ab-
sorption is represented by Hogarth's Rake's Progress and similar nar-
rative sequences of pictures, in the scroll pictures of the Orient,
or in the novels in woodcuts that occasionally appear. Pictorial ar-
rangements of the visible basis of literature, which is alphabetical
THEORY OF GENRES
writing, have had a more fitful and sporadic existence, ranging from
capitals in illuminated manuscripts to surrealist experiments in col-
lage, and have not had much specifically literary importance. They
would have had more, of course, if our writing had remained in the
hieroglyphic stage, as in hieroglyphics writing and drawing are much
the same art. We have previously glanced at Pound's comparison
of the imagistic lyric to the Chinese ideogram.
We should expect that during the last century there would have
been a good deal said about the relation of poetry to music on the
one hand, and to painting on the other. In fact the attempts to
bring words as near as possible to the more repetitive and emphatic
rhythm of music or the more concentrated stasis of painting mahe
up the main body of what is usually called experimental writing.
It would make for clearer thinking if these developments were
regarded as lateral explorations of a single phase of rhetoric, not,
through a false analogy with science, as ''new directions" portend-
ing a general advance of literary technique on all fronts. The re-
verse movement of the same progressive fallacy gives us the moral
indignation that talks about "decadence." A question on which
little has yet been said is the extent to which poetry may, so to
speak, disappear into painting or music and come back with a dif-
ferent rhythm. This happened for example in the emergence of
the "prosa" out of the sequence in medieval music, and it happens
in a different way when a song becomes a kind of rhythmical res-
ervoir for a number of different lyrics.
The two elements of subconscious association which form the
basis for lyrical melos and opsis respectively have never been given
names. We may call them, if the terms are thought dignified
enough, babble and doodle. In babble, rhyme, assonance, allitera-
tion, and puns develop out of sound-associations. The thing that
gives shape to the associating is what we have been calling the
rhythmical initiative, though in a free verse poem it would be
rather a sense of the oscillations of rhythm within an area which
gradually becomes defined as the containing form. We can see
from the revisions poets make that the rhythm is usually prior,
either in inspiration or in importance or both, to the selection of
words to fill it up. This phenomenon is not confined to poetry:
in Beethoven's notebooks, too, we often see how he knows that
he wants a cadence at a certain bar before he has worked out any
melodic sequence to reach it. One can see a similar evolution in
^75
FOURTH essay; RHETORICAL CRITICISM
children, who start with rhythmical babble and fill in the appropri-
ate words as they go along. The process is also reflected in nursery
rhymes, college yells, work songs, and the like, where rhythm is a
physical pulsation close to the dance, and is often filled up with
nonsense words. An obvious priority of rhythm to sense is a regular
feature of popular poetry, and verse, like music, is called 'flight''
whenever it has the rhythmical accentuation of a railway coach
with a flat wheel.
When babble cannot rise into consciousness, it remains on the
level of uncontrolled association. This latter is often a literary way
of representing insanity, and Smart's Jubilate Agno, parts of which
are usually considered mentally unbalanced, shows the creative
process in an interesting formative stage:
For the power of some animal is predominant in every language.
For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek.
For the sound of a cat is in the most useful preposition /car ev-
X€v . . .
For the Mouse (Mus) prevails in the Latin.
For edi-mus, bibi-mus, vivi-mus—ore-mus . . .
For two creatures the Bull & the Dog prevail in the English,
For all the words ending in ble are in the creature.
Invisi-ble, Incomprehensi-ble, ineffa-ble, A-ble . . .
For there are many words under Bull . . .
For Brook is under Bull. God be gracious to Lord Bolingbroke.
It is possible that similar sputters and sparks of the fusing intellect
take place in all poetic thinking. The puns in this passage impress
the reader as both outrageous and humorous, which is consistent
with Freud's view of wit as the escape of impulse from the control
of the censor. In creation the impulse is the creative energy itself,
and the censor is what we have called the plausibility-principle.
Paronomasia is one of the essential elements of verbal creation,
but a pun introduced into a conversation turns its back on the sense
of the conversation and sets up a self-contained verbal sound-sense
pattern in its place.
There is a perilous balance in paronomasia between verbal wit
and hypnotic incantation. In Poe's line "the viol, the violet and the
vine," we have a fusion of two opposed qualities. Wit makes us
laugh, and is addressed to the awakened intelligence; incantation
by itself is humorlessly impressive. Wit detaches the reader; the
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THEORY OF GENRES
oracle absorbs him. In dream-poems like Arthur Benson’s The Phoe-
nix, or in poems intended to represent dreaming or drowsy states,
like the medieval Pearl and many passages in Spenser and Tenny-
son, we notice a similar insistence on hypnotically recurrent sound-
patterns. If we were to laugh at the wit in such a line as Poe’s, we
should break the spell of his poem, yet the line is witty, just as Finne-
gans Wake is a very funny book, although it never leaves the oracu-
lar solemnity of the dream world. In the latter, of course, the re-
searches of Freud and Jung into the mechanisms of both dream and
wit have been extensively drawn upon. There' may well be buried
in it some such word as “vinolent,” intended to express everything in
Poe’s line at once. In fiction the associative process ordinarily shows
itself chiefly in the names the author invents for his characters.
Thus ''Lilliputian” and "Ebenezer Scrooge” are associative names
for midgets and misers respectively, because one suggests "little”
and "puny” and the other "squeeze,” "screw” and perhaps "geezer.”
Spenser says that a character of his has been named Malfont:
Eyther for th’ euill, which he did therein.
Or that he likened was to a welhed,
which implies that the second syllable of his name is to be derived
both from fons and from facere. We may call this kind of associa-
tive process poetic etymology, and we shall say more about it later.
The characteristics of babble are again present in doggerel, which
is also a creative process left unfinished through lack of skill or pa-
tience, though the psychological conditions are of the opposite kind
from those of Jubilate Agno, Doggerel is not necessarily stupid po-
etry; it is poetry that begins in the conscious mind and has never
gone through the associative process. It has a prose initiative, but
tries to make itself associative by an act of will, and it reveals the
same difficulties that great poetry has overcome at a subconscious
level. We can see in doggerel how words are dragged in because they
rhyme or scan, how ideas are dragged in because they are suggested
by a rhyme-word, and so on. Deliberate doggerel, as we have it in
Hudibras or German knittelvers, can be a source of brilliant rhetori-
cal satire, and one which involves a kind of parody of poetic crea-
tion itself, just as malapropism is a parody of poetic etymology.
The difficulties in the way of giving prose itself something of the
associative concentration of poetry are enormous, and not many
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FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
prose writers, apart from Flaubert and Joyce, have consistently and
resolutely faced them.
The first rough sketches of verbal design (“doodle'') in the crea-
tive process are hardly separable from associative babble. Phrases
are scribbled in notebooks to be used later; a first stanza may sud-
denly “come" and then other stanzas of the same shape have to be
designed to go with it, and all the ingenuity that Freud has traced in
the dream has to be employed in putting words into patterns. The
elaborateness of conventional forms— the sonnet and its less versatile
congeners the ballade, villanelle, sestina, and the like, together with
all the other conventions that the individual lyric poet invents for
himself— indicates how far removed the lyrical initiative really is
from whatever a cri de coeur is supposed to be. Poe's essay on his
own The Raven is a perfectly accurate account of what he did in
that poem, whether he did it on the conscious mental level that
the essay suggests or not, and this essay, like The Poetic Principle^
anticipates the critical techniques of a new mode.
We may note that although of course lyrics in all ages are ad-
dressed to the ear, the rise of fiction and the printing press develops
an increasing tendency to address the ear through the eye. The
visual patterns of E. E. Cummings are obvious examples, but do
not by any means stand alone. A poem of Marianne Moore's,
Camellia Sabina^ employs an eight-line stanza in which the rhym-
ing words are at the end of the first line, at the end of the eighth
line, and at the third syllable of the seventh line. I doubt if the
most attentive listener could pick this last rhyme up merely from
hearing the poem read aloud: one sees it first on the page, and
then translates the visual structural pattern to the ear.
We are now in a position to find more acceptable words for
babble and doodle, the radicals of lyrical melos and opsis respec-
tively. The radical of melos is charm: the hypnotic incantation that,
through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical
response, and is hence not far from the sense of magic, or physi-
cally compelling power. The etymological descent of charm from
carmen, song, may be noted. Actual charms have a quality that is
imitated in popular literature by work songs of various kinds, espe-
cially lullabies, where the drowsy sleep-inducing repetition shows
the underlying oracular or dream pattern very clearly. Invective or
flyting, the literary imitation of the spell-binding curse, uses similar
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THEORY OF GENRES
incantatory devices for opposite reasons, as in Dunbar’s Flyting
with Kennedy:
Mauch mutton, bytbuttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous;
Rank beggar, ostir dregar, foule fleggar in the flet;
Chittirlilling, ruch rilling, like schilling in the milhous;
Baird rehator, theif of natour, fals tratour, feyindis gett . . .
From here the line of descent is easy to the melos of physical
absorption in sound and rhythm, the pounding movement and
clashing noise which the heavy accentuation of English makes pos-
sible. Lindsay’s The Congo and Sweeney Agonistes are modern ex-
amples of a tendency to ragtime in English poetry that can be traced
back through Poe’s Bells and Dryden’s Alexander's Feast to Skelton
and to Dunbar’s Ane Ballot of our Lady. A more refined aspect of
melos is exhibited in lyrics which combine accentual repetition
with variations in speed. Thus Wyatt’s sonnet:
I abide and abide and better abide,
And, after the olde proverbe, the happie daye:
And ever my ladye to me dothe saye,
''Let me alone and I will provyde.”
I abide and abide and tarrye the tyde
And with abiding spede well ye maye:
Thus do I abide I wott allwaye,
Nother obtayning nor yet denied.
Aye me! this long abidyng
Semithe to me as who sayethe
A prolonging of a dieng dethe.
Or a refusing of a desyred thing.
Moche ware it bettre for to be playne.
Then to saye abide and yet shall not obtayne.
This lovely sonnet is intensely musical in its conception: there
is the repeated clang of "abide” and the musical, though poetically
very audacious, sequential repetition of the first line in the fifth.
Then as hope follows expectancy, doubt hope, and despair doubt,
the lively rhythm gradually slows down and collapses. On the other
hand, Skelton, like Scarlatti after him, gets fidgety in a slow rhythm
and is more inclined to speed up. Here is an accelerando in a rhyme
royal stanza from The Garland of Laurell:
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
That long tyme blew a full tymorous blaste,
Like to the Boriall wyndes, whan they blowe,
That towres and tounes and trees downe cast,
Drove clouds together like dryftes of snowe;
The dredful dinne drove all the route on a row;
Som trembled, som girned, som gasped, som gased.
As people half pevissh or men that were mased.
In the same poem there is a curious coincidental link with music:
the verses to Margery Wentworth, Margaret Hussey, and Gertrude
Statham are miniature musical rondos of the abaca type.
We have several times noticed the close relation between the
visual and the conceptual in poetry, and the radical of opsis in the
lyric is riddlCy which is characteristically a fusion of sensation and
reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a
mental activity in connection with it. Riddle was originally the
cognate object of read, and the riddle seems intimately involved
with the whole process of reducing language to visible form, a proc-
ess which runs through such by-forms of riddle as hieroglyphic and
ideogram. The actual riddle-poems of Old English include some
of its finest lyrics, and belong to a culture in which such a phrase
as ''curiously inwrought'' is a favorite aesthetic judgement. Just as
the charm is not far from a sense of magical compulsion, so the
curiously wrought object, whether sword-hilt or illuminated manu-
script, is not far from a sense of enchantment or magical imprison-
ment. Closely parallel to the riddle in Old English is the figure of
speech known as the kenning or oblique description which calls
the body the bone-house and the sea the whale-road.
In all ages of poetry the fusion of the concrete and the abstract,
the spatial and the conceptual aspects of dianoia, has been a cen-
tral feature of poetic imagery in every genre, and the kenning has
had a long line of descent. In the fifteenth century we have "aureate
diction,” the use of abstract terms in poetry, then thought of as
"colors” of rhetoric. When such words were new and the ideas
represented by them exciting, aureate diction must have sounded
far less dull and bumbling than it generally does to us, and have
had much more of the sense of intellectual precision that we feel
in such phrases as Eliot's "piaculative pence” or Auden's "cere-
brotonic Cato.” The seventeenth century gave us the conceit or
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THEORY OF GENRES
intellectualized image of ''metaphysicaF' poetry, typically Baroque
in its ability to express an exuberant sense of design combined with
a witty and paradoxical sense of the stress and tension underlying
the design. The eighteenth century showed its respect for the
categorizing power of abstract thought in its poetic diction, in which
fish appear as the finny tribe. In the low mimetic period a growing
prejudice against convention made poets less aware of the conven-
tional phrases they used, but the technical problems of poetical
imagery did not thereby disappear, nor did conventional figures of
speech.
Two of these connected with the matter under discussion, the
fusion of the concrete with the abstract, may be noted. An abstract
noun in the possessive case followed by an adjective and a con-
crete noun (''death's dateless night” is a Shakespearean example)
is a nineteenth-century favorite. In J. R. LowelFs Harvard Com-
memoration Ode of 1865 this figure is employed nineteen times,
"life's best oil,” "Oblivion's subtle wrong” and "Fortune's fickle
moon” being three examples. In the twentieth century it was suc-
ceeded in favor by another phrase of "the adjective noun of noun”
type, in which the first noun is usually concrete and the second ab-
stract. Thus: "the pale dawn of longing,” ".the broken collar-bone
of silence,” "the massive eyelids of time,” "the crimson tree of
love.” I have made these up myself, and they are free to any poet
who wants them, but on examining a volume of twentieth-century
lyrics I find, counting all the variants, thirty-eight phrases of this
type in the first five poems.
The fusion of the concrete and abstract is a special case, though
a very important one, of a general principle that the technical de-
velopment of the last century has exposed to critical view. All poetic
imagery seems to be founded on metaphor, but in the lyric, where
the associative process is strongest and the ready-made descriptive
phrases of ordinary prose furthest away, the unexpected or violent
metaphor that is called catachresis has a peculiar importance. Much
more frequently than any other genre does the lyric depend for
its main effect on the fresh or surprising image, a fact which often
gives rise to the illusion that such imagery is radically new or un-
conventional. From Nashe's "Brightness falls from the air” to Dy-
lan Thomas's "A grief ago,” the emotional crux of the lyric has
over and over again tended to be this "sudden glory” of fused
metaphor.
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FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
SPECIFIC FORMS OF DRAMA
We have now to see whether this expansion of perspective, which
enables us to consider the relation of the lexis or verbal pattern to
music and spectacle, gives us any new light on the traditional clas-
sifications within the genres. The division of dramas into tragedies
and comedies, for instance, is a conception based entirely on verbal
drama, and does not include or account for types of drama, such
as the opera or masque, in which music and scenery have a more
organic place. Yet verbal drama, whether tragic or comic, has clearly
developed a long way from the primitive idea of drama, which is to
present a powerful sensational focus for a community. The scrip-
tural plays of the Middle Ages are primitive in this sense: they
present to the audience a myth already familiar to and significant
for that audience, and they are designed to remind the audience
of their communal possession of this myth.
The scriptural play is a form of a spectacular dramatic genre
which we may provisionally call a ''myth-play.'' It is a somewhat
negative and receptive form, and takes on the mood of the myth
it represents. The crucifixion play in the Towneley cycle is tragic
because the Crucifixion is; but it is not a tragedy in the sense that
Othello is a tragedy. It does not, that is, make a tragic point; it
simply presents the story because it is familiar and significant. It
would be nonsense to apply such tragic conceptions as hybris to
the figure of Christ in that play, and while pity and terror are raised,
they remain attached to the subject, and there is no catharsis of
them. The characteristic mood and resolution of the myth-play are
pensive, and pensiveness, in this context, implies a continuing
imaginative subjection to the story. The myth-play emphasizes
dramatically the symbol of spiritual and corporeal communion. The
scriptural plays themselves were associated with the festival of
Corpus Christi, and Calderon's religious plays are explicitly autos
sacramentales or Eucharist plays. The appeal of the myth-play is
a curious mixture of the popular and the esoteric; it is popular for
its immediate audience, but those outside its circle have to make
a conscious effort to appreciate it. In a controversial atmosphere it
disappears, as it cannot deal with controversial issues unless it se-
lects its audience. In view of the ambiguities attaching to the word
myth, we shall speak of this genre as the auto.
When there is no clear-cut distinction between gods and heroes
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THEORY OF GENRES
in a society's mythology, or between the ideals of the nobility and
the priesthood, the auto may present a legend which is secular and
sacred at once. An example is the No drama of japan, which with
its unification of chivalric and otherworldly symbols and its dreamy
un-tragic, un-comic mood so strongly attracted Yeats. It is interest-
ing to see how Yeats, both in his theory of the anima mundi and in
his desire to get his play as physically close to the audience as pos-
sible, reverts to the archaic idea of corporeal communion. In Greeh
drama, too, there is no sharp boundary line between the divine
and the heroic protagonist. But in Christian societies we can see
glimpses of a secular auto, a romantic drama presenting the ex-
ploits of a hero, which is closely related to tragedy, the end of a
hero's exploit being eventually his death, but which in itself is
neither tragic nor comic, being primarily spectacular.
Tamburlaine is such a play: there the relation between the hero's
hybris and his death is more casual than causal. This genre has had
varying luck: more in Spain, for instance, than in France, where
the establishing of tragedy was part of an intellectual revolution.
The two attempts in France to move tragedy back towards heroic
romance, Le Cid and Hernani, each precipitated a big row. In
Germany, on the other hand, it is clear that the actual genre of
many plays by Goethe and Schiller is the heroic romance, however
much affected they have been by the prestige of tragedy. In Wag-
ner, who expands the heroic form all the way back to a sacramental
drama of gods, the symbol of communion again occupies a con-
spicuous place, negatively in Tristan, positively in Parsifal, In pro-
portion as it moves closer to tragedy and further from the sacred
auto, drama tends to make less use of music. If we look at the
earliest extant play of Aeschylus, The Suppliants, we can see that
close behind it is a predominantly musical structure of which the
modern counterpart would normally be the oratorio— it is perhaps
possible to describe Wagner's operas as fermented oratorios.
In Renaissance England the audience was too bourgeois for a
chivalric drama to get firmly established, and the Elizabethan
secular auto eventually became the history-play. With the history-
play we move from spectacle to a more purely verbal drama, and
the symbols of communion become much attenuated, although
they are still there. The central theme of Elizabethan history is
the unifying of the nation and the binding of the audience into the
myth as the inheritors of j:hat unity, set over against the disasters
283
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
of civil war and weak leadership. One may even recognize a secular
Eucharist symbol in the red and white rose, just as one may recog-
nize in the plays that end by pointing to Elizabeth, like Peek's Ar-
raignment of PariSj a secular counterpart of a mystery play of the
Virgin. But the emphasis and characteristic resolution of the his-
tory play are in terms of continuity and the closing up both of tragic
catastrophe and (as in the case of Falstaff) of the comic festival.
One may compare Shaw's ''chronicle play” of Saint Joan^ where
the end of the play is a tragedy, followed by an epilogue in which
the rejection of Joan is, like the rejection of Falstaff, historical,
suggesting continuity rather than a rounded finish.
The history merges so gradually into tragedy that we often can-
not be sure when communion has turned into catharsis. Richard II
and Richard III are tragedies insofar as they resolve on those de-
feated kings; they are histories insofar as they resolve on Boling-
broke and Richmond, and the most one can say is that they lean
toward history. Hamlet and Macbeth lean toward tragedy, but For-
tinbras and Malcolm, the continuing characters, indicate the his-
torical element in the tragic resolution. There seems to be a far
less direct connection between history and comedy: the comic
scenes in the histories are, so to speak, subversive. Henry V ends
in triumph and marriage, but an action that kills Falstaff, hangs
Bardolph and debases Pistol is not related to comedy in the way
that Richard II is related to tragedy.
We are here concerned only with tragedy as a species of drama.
Tragic drama derives from the auto its central heroic figure, but
the association of heroism with downfall is due to the simultaneous
presence of irony. The nearer the tragedy is to auto, the more closely
associated the hero is with divinity; the nearer to irony, the more
human the hero is, and the more the catastrophe appears to be
a social rather than a cosmological event. Elizabethan tragedy
shows a historical development from Marlowe, who presents his
heroes more or less as demigods moving in a kind of social ether,
to Webster, whose tragedies are almost clinical analyses of a sick
society, Greek tragedy never broke completely from the auto, and
so never developed a social form, though there are tendencies to
it in Euripides. But whatever the proportions of heroism and irony,
tragedy shows itself to be primarily a vision of the supremacy of
the event or mythos. The response to tragedy is "this must be,” or,
28^
THEORY OF GENRES
perhaps more accurately, ''this does happen'': the event is primary,
the explanation of it secondary and variable.
As tragedy moves over tOAvards irony, the sense of inevitable event
begins to fade out, and the sources of catastrophe come into view.
In irony catastrophe is either arbitrary and meaningless, the im-
pact of an unconscious (or, in the pathetic fallacy, malignant)
world on conscious man, or the result of more or less definable so-
cial and psychological forces. Tragedy's "this must be" becomes
irony's "this at least is," a concentration on foreground facts and
a rejection of mythical superstructures. Thus the ironic drama is a
vision of what in theology is called the fallen world, of simple hu-
manity, man as natural man and in conflict with both human and
non-human nature. In nineteenth-century drama the tragic vision
is often identical with the ironic one, hence nineteenth-century
tragedies tend to be either Schicksal dramas dealing with the arbi-
trary ironies of fate, or (clearly the more rewarding form) studies
of the frustrating and smothering of human activity by the com-
bined pressure of a reactionary society without and a disorganized
soul within. Such irony is difficult to sustain in the theatre because
it tends toward a stasis of action. In those parts of Chekhov, notably
the last act of The Three Sisters^ where the characters one by one
withdraw from each other into their subjective prison-cells, we are
coming about as close to pure irony as the stage can get.
The ironic play passes through a dead center of complete realism,
a pure mime representing human life without comment and with-
out imposing any sort of dramatic form beyond what is required
for simple exhibition. This idolatrous form of mimesis is rare, but
the thin line of its tradition can be traced from Classical mime-
writers like Herodas to their tranche'de-yie descendants in recent
times. The mime is somewhat commoner as an individual per-
formance, and, outside the theatre, the Browning monodrama is a
logical development of the isolating and soliloquizing tendencies
of ironic conflict. In the theatre we usually find that the spectacle
of "all too human" life is either oppressive or ridiculous, and that
it tends to pass directly from one to the other. Irony, then, as it
moves away from tragedy, begins to merge into comedy.
Ironic comedy presents us of course with "the way of the world,"
but as soon as we find sympathetic or even neutral characters in a
comedy, we move into the more familiar comic area where we have
a group of humors outwitted by the opposing group. Just as tragedy
285
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
is a vision of the supremacy of mythos or thing done, and just as
irony is a vision of ethos, or character individualized against en-
vironment, so comedy is a vision of dianoici, a significance which is
ultimately social significance, the establishing of a desirable so-
ciety. As an imitation of life, drama is, in terms of mythos, conflict;
in terms of ethos, a representative image; in terms of dianoia, the
final harmonic chord revealing the tonality under the narrative
movement, it is community. The further comedy moves from irony,
the more it becomes what we here call ideal comedy, the vision
not of the way of the world, but of what you will, life as you like it.
Shakespeare's main interest is in getting away from the son-father
conflict of ironic comedy towards a vision of a serene community,
a vision most prominent in The Tempest. Here the action is polar-
ized around a younger and an older man working in harmony to-
gether, a lover and a benevolent teacher.
The next step brings us to the extreme limit of social comedy,
the symposium, the structure of which is, as we should expect,
clearest in Plato, whose Socrates is both teacher and lover, and
whose vision moves toward an integration of society in a form like
that of the symposium itself, the dialectic festivity which, as is
explained in the opening of the Laws, is the controlling force that
holds society together. It is easy to see that Plato's dialogue form
is dramatic and has affinities with comedy and mime; and while
there is much in Plato's thought that contradicts the spirit of com-
edy as we have outlined it, it is significant that he contradicts it
directly, tries to kidnap it, so to speak. It seems almost a rule that
the more he does this, the further he moves into pure exposition
or dictatorial monologue and away from drama. The most dramatic
of his dialogues, such as Euthydemus, are regularly the most in-
decisive in philosophical "position.^'
In our own day Bernard Shaw has tried hard to keep the sym-
posium in the theatre. His early manifesto, The Quintessence of
Ibsenism, states that a play should be an intelligent discussion of
a serious problem, and in his preface to Getting Married he re-
marks approvingly on the fact that it observes the unities of time
and place. For comedy of Shaw's type tends to a symposium form
which occupies the same amount of time in its action that the audi-
ence consumes in watching it. However, Shaw discovered in prac-
tice that what emerges from the theatrical symposium is not a
dialectic that compels to a course of action or thought, but one
286
THEORY OF GENRES
that emancipates from formulated principles of conduct. The shape
of such a comedy is very clear in the bright little sketch In Good
King Charles's Golden Days, where even the most highly developed
human types, the saintly Fox and the philosophical Newton, are
shown to be comic humors by the mere presence of other types
of people. Yet the central symposium figure of the haranguing lover
bulks formidably in Man and Superman, and even the renunciation
of love for mathematics at the end of Back to Methusaleh is con-
sistent with the symposium spirit.
The view of poetry which sees it as intermediate between his-
tory and philosophy, its images combining the temporal events of
the one with the timeless ideas of the other, seems to be still in-
volved in this exposition of dramatic forms. We can now see a
mimetic or verbal drama stretching from the history-play to the
philosophy-play (the act-play and the scene-play) , with the mime,
the pure image, halfway between. These three are specialized forms,
cardinal points of drama rather than generic areas. But the whole
mimetic area is only a part, a semicircle, let us say, of all drama. In
the misty and unexplored region of the other semicircle of spec-
tacular drama we have identified a quadrant that we have called the
auto, and we have now to chart the fourth quadrant that lies be-
tween the auto and comedy, and establish the fourth cardinal point
where it meets the auto again. When we think of the clutter of
forms that belong here, we are strongly tempted to call our fourth
area “miscellaneous'^ and let it go; but it is precisely here that new
generic criticism is needed.
The further comedy moves from irony, and the more it rejoices
in the free movement of its happy society, the more readily it takes
to music and dancing. As music and scenery increase in importance,
the ideal comedy crosses the boundary line of spectacular drama and
becomes the masque. In Shakespeare's ideal comedies, especially
A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, the close affinity
with the masque is not hard to see. The masque— or at least the
kind of masque that is nearest to comedy, and which we shall here
call the ideal masque— is still in the area of dianoia: it is usually a
compliment to the audience, or an important member of it, and
leads up to an idealization of the society represented by that audi-
ence. Its plots and characters are fairly stock, as they exist only in
relation to the significance of the occasion.
It thus differs from comedy in its more intimate attitude to the
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FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
audience: there is more insistence on the connection between the
audience and the community on the stage. The members of a
masque are ordinarily disguised members of the audience, and there
is a final gesture of surrender when the actors unmask and join the
audience in a dance. The ideal masque is in fact a myth-play like
the auto, to which it is related much as comedy is to tragedy. It is
designed to emphasize, not the ideals to be achieved by discipline
or' faith, but ideals which are desired or considered to be already
possessed. Its settings are seldom remote from magic and fairyland,
from Arcadias and visions of earthly Paradise. It uses gods freely,
like the auto, but possessively, and without imaginative subjection.
In Western drama, from the Renaissance to the end of the eight-
eenth century, masque and ideal comedy make great use of Clas-
sical mythology, which the audience is not obliged to accept as
The rather limited masque throws some light on the structure
and characteristics of its two far more important and versatile neigh-
bors. For the masque is flanked on one side by the musically organ-
ized drama which we call opera, and on the other by a scenically
organized drama, which has now settled in the movie. Puppet-plays
and the vast Chinese romances where, as in the movie, the au-
dience enters and leaves unpredictably, are examples of pre-camera
scenic masques. Both opera and movie are, like the masque, pro-
verbial for lavish display, and part of the reason for it in the movie
is that many movies are actually bourgeois myth-plays, as half a
dozen critics suddenly and almost simultaneously discovered a few
years ago. The predominance of the private life of the actor in the
imaginations of many moviegoers may perhaps have some analogy
with the consciously assumed disguise of the masque.
Opera and movie possess, unlike the masque, the power of pro-
ducing spectacular imitations of mimetic drama. The opera can
only do this by simplifying its musical organization, otherwise its
dramatic structure will be blurred by the distortion of acting which
the highly repetitive structure of music makes necessary. The movie
similarly must simplify its spectacle. In proportion as it follows its
natural bent for scenic organization, the movie reveals its affinities
with other forms of scenic masque: with the puppet-play in Chaplin
and others, with the commedia delF arte in recent Italian films,
with the ballet and pantomime in musical comedies. When the
movie succeeds in imitating a mimetic drama, the distinction bc-
288
THEORY OF GENRES
tween the two forms is not worth making, but the generic difference
shows itself in other ways. Mimetic drama works towards an end
which illuminates, by being logically connected with, the begin-
ning: hence the parabola shape of the typical five-act mimetic
structure, and hence the teleological quality in drama expressed
by the term discovery. Spectacular drama, on the other hand, is by
nature processional, and tends to episodic and piecemeal discovery,
as we can see in all forms of pure spectacle, from the circus parade
to the revue. In the auto too, on the other side of spectacular drama,
the same processional structure appears in the long continued sto-
ries of Shakespearean history and scriptural pageant. In the rotating
performance and casual attendance of the movie, and the sequence
of arias forcibly linked to dramatic structure by recitative in the
opera, one can see the strong native tendency to linear movement
in spectacular forms. In Shakespeare's first experimental romance,
TencleSy the movement toward processional structure, a sequence
of scenes ''dispersedly in various countries," is very clear.
The essential feature of the ideal masque is the exaltation of the
audience, who form the goal of its procession. In the autOy drama
is at its most objective; the audience's part is to accept the story
without judgement. In tragedy there is judgement, but the source
of the tragic discovery is on the other side of the stage; and what-
ever it is, it is stronger than the audience. In the ironic play, audi-
ence and drama confront each other directly; in the comedy the
source of the discovery has moved across to the audience itself.
The ideal masque places the audience in a position of superiority
to discovery. The verbal action of Figaro is comic and that of Don
Giovanni tragic; but in both cases the audience is exalted by the
music above the reach of tragedy and comedy, and, though as pro-
foundly moved as ever, is not emotionally involved with the dis-
covery of plot or characters. It looks at the downfall of Don Juan
as spectacular entertainment, much as the gods are supposed to
look at the downfall of Ajax or Darius. The same sense of viewing
the dramatic mimesis through a haze of spectacular exhilaration is
also of central importance in the movie, as it is even more obviously
in the puppet-play from which the movie is chiefly descended. We
move from ironic to ideal comedy through the symposium, and we
note that at the conclusion of Plato's Symposium the prophecy is
made that the same poet should be able to write both tragedy and
comedy, though the ones who have done so most successfully are
289
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
those who, like Shakespeare and Mozart, have had a strong interest
in spectacular forms.
For our next step we must return to the masque proper. The
further comedy moves from irony, the less social power is allowed
to the humors. In the masque, where the ideal society is still more
in the ascendant, the humors become degraded into the uncouth
figures of the Jonsonian antimasque, who are said to be descended
from a dramatic form far older than the rest of the masque. Farce,
being a non-mimetic form of comedy, has a natural place in the
masque, though in the ideal masque its natural place is that of a
rigorously controlled interlude. In The Tempest a comedy so pro-
found that it seems to draw the whole masque into itself, Stephano
and Trinculo are comic humors and Caliban an antimasque figure,
and the group shows the transition very clearly. The main theme of
the masque involves gods, fairies, and personifications of virtues;
the figures of the antimasque thus tend to become demonic, and
dramatic characterization begins to split into an antithesis of virtue
and vice, god and devil, fairy and monster. The tension between
them partly accounts for the importance of the theme of magic
in the masque. At the comic end this magic is held by the benevo-
lent side, as in The Tempest; but as we move further away from
comedy, the conflict becomes increasingly serious, and the anti-
masque figures less ridiculous and more sinister, possessed in their
turn of powers of enchantment. This is the stage represented by
Comus, which is very close to the open conflict of good and evil
in the morality play. With the morality play we pass into another
area of masque which we shall here call the archetypal masque,
the prevailing form of most twentieth-century highbrow drama, at
least in continental Europe, as well as of many experimental operas
and unpopular movies.
The ideal masque tends to individualize its audience by pointing
to the central member of it: even the movie audience, sitting in
the dark in small units (usually of two), is a relatively individualized
one. A growing sense of loneliness is noticeable as we move away
from comedy. The archetypal masque, like all forms of spectacular
drama, tends to detach its settings from time and space, but in-
stead of the Arcadias of the ideal masque, we find ourselves fre-
quently in a sinister limbo, like the threshold of death in Everyman,
the sealed underworld crypts of Maeterlinck, or the nightmares of
the future in expressionist plays. As we get nearer the rationale of
290
THEORY OF GENRES
the form, we see that the auto symbol of communion in one body is
reappearing, but in a psychological and subjective form, and with-
out gods. The action of the archetypal masque takes place in a
world of human types, which at its most concentrated becomes the
interior of the human mind. This is explicit even in the old morali-
ties, like Mankynd and The Castell of PerseyeTaunce^ and at least
implicit in a good deal of Maeterlinck, Pirandello, Andreyev, and
Strindberg.
Naturally, with such a setting, characterization has to break down
into elements and fragments of personality. This is why I call the
form the archetypal masque, the word archetype being in this con-
text used in Jung's sense of an aspect of the personality capable of
dramatic projection. Jung's persona and anima and counsellor and
shadow throw a great deal of light on the characterization of mod-
ern allegorical, psychic, and expressionist dramas, with their circus
barkers and wraith-like females and inscrutable sages and obsessed
demons. Tlie abstract entities of the morality play and the stock
types of the commedia dell' arte (this latter representing one of
the primitive roots of the genre) are similar constructions.
A sense of confusion and fear accompanies the sense of loneliness:
Maeterlinck's early plays are almost dedicated to fear, and the con-
stant undermining of the distinction between illusion and reality,
as mental projections become physical bodies and vice versa, splits
the action up into a kaleidoscopic chaos of reflecting mirrors. The
mob scenes of German expressionist plays and the mechanical
fantasies of the Capeks show the same disintegration at work in a
social context. From the generic point of view, one of the most
interesting archetypal plays is Andreyev's powerful The Black
Maskers, in which its author saw reflected not only the destruction
of an individual's nobile castello, which is its explicit theme, but
the whole social collapse of modern Russia. This play distinguishes
two groups of dissociative elements of personality, one group con-
nected with self-accusation and the other with the death-wish, and
it exhibits the human soul as a castle possessed by a legion of de-
mons. It is evident that the further the archetypal masque gets
from the ideal masque, the more clearly it reveals itself as the
emancipated antimasque, a revel of satyrs who have got out of con-
trol. The progress of sophisticated drama appears to be towards
an anagnorisis or recognition of the most primitive of all dramatic
forms.
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
At the far end of the archetypal masque, where it joins the auto,
we reach the point indicated by Nietzsche as the point of the
birth of tragedy, where the revel of satyrs impinges on the appear-
ance of a commanding god, and Dionysos is brought into line with
Apollo. We may call this fourth cardinal point of drama the epiph-
any, the dramatic apocalypse or separation of the divine and the
demonic, a point directly opposite the mime, which presents the
simply human mixture. This point is the dramatic form of the
point of epiphany, most familiar as the point at which the Book
of Job, after describing a complete circuit from tragedy through
symposium, finally ends. Here the two monsters behemoth and
leviathan replace the more frequent demonic animals.
The Classical critics, from Aristotle to Horace, were puzzled to
understand why a disorganized ribald farce like the satyr-play should
be the source of tragedy, though they were clear that it was. In
medieval drama, where the progression through sacred and heroic
auto to tragedy is so much less foreshortened, the development is
plainer. The most clearly epiphanic form of scriptural drama is the
Harrowing of Hell play, which depicts the triumph of a divine
redeemer over demonic resistance. The devils of that play are the
Christian forms of figures very like the Greek satyrs, and dramatic
groups generically very close to the satyrs are never far from any
scriptural play that deals directly with Christ, whether tamed and
awed as in the Secunda Pastorum, or triumphantly villainous, as
in the crucifixion and Herod plays. And just as Greek tragedy re-
tained and developed the satyr-play, so Elizabethan tragedy retains
a satyric counterpoint in its clown scenes and the farcical under-
plots of Faustus and many later tragedies. The same element pro-
vides those superb episodes of the porter in Macbeth, the grave-dig-
gers in Hamlet, and the serpent-bearer in Antony and Cleopatra,
which so baffled Classically-minded critics who had forgotten about
the satyr-play. Perhaps we could make more dramatic sense out of
Titus Andronicus if we could see it as an unharrowed hell, a satyr-
play of obscene and gibbering demons.
TTie two nodes of the scriptural play are Christmas and Easter: the
latter presents the triumphant god, the former the quiet virgin
mother who gathers to herself the processional masque of the
kings and shepherds. This figure is at the opposite end of the
masque from the watching queen or peeress of an ideal masque,
with the virtuous but paralyzed Lady of Comus halfway between.
THEORY OF GENRES
A female figure symbolizing some kind of reconciling unity and
order appears dimly at the end of the great panoramic masques of
Faust and Peer Gynt^ the ''eternal feminine'' of the former having
some of its traditional links. Modern examples of the same epi-
phanic form range from Claudel's Annunciation play to Yeats's
Countess Cathleen, where the heroine is really a female and Irish
Jesus, sacrificing herself for her people and then cheating the devils
by the purity of her nature, very much as in the pre-Anselm theory
of the atonement. As Yeats remarks in a note, the story rep-
resents one of the supreme parables of the world,
SPECIFIC THEMATIC FORMS
(LYRIC AND EPOS)
We said that the drama was an external and the lyric an internal
mimesis of sound and imagery, both genres avoiding the mimesis
of direct address. Again, in the terms of our first essay, drama tends
to be a fictional and lyric a thematic mode. We found it most
convenient to survey the specific forms of drama as a cycle of fic-
tions, and this gave us a rough but possibly useful classification of
the species of drama as well. We propose now to make a survey of
a corresponding cycle of themes, and apply the survey to the lyric,
along with such epos forms, including oratorical prose, as are suf-
ficiently thematic or close to the lyric to belong here. Purely nar-
rative poems, being fictions, will, if episodic, correspond to the
species of drama; if continuous, to the species of prose fiction to be
examined later.
The lyric, however, can obviously be on any subject and of any
shape. It is not conventionalized by its audience, like the drama, or
by a fixed radical of presentation, such as the drama has in the
theatre. Consequently this survey will not give, and is not intended
to give, a classification of specific forms of lyric: what it attempts
to give is an account of the chief conventional themes of lyric and
epos. Once more, the object is not to "fit" poems into categories,
but to show empirically how conventional archetypes get embodied
in conventional genres.
Let us start with the oracular associative process that we identi-
fied as one of the initiatives of lyric, and which conesponds to
what we called the epiphany in drama. One of the most direct
products of this is a type of religious poetry marked by a concen-
tration of sound and ambiguity of sense, of which the most familiar
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
modern example is the poetry of Hopkins. In religious poetry with
elaborate stanzaic patterns, such as the Pearl and many poems of
Herbert, we realize that the discipline of finding rhymes and ar-
ranging words in intricate patterns is appropriate to the sense of
chastened wit, a type of sacrificium intellectus, that goes with the
form. Such intricate verbal patterns go back through the acrostics
of Aldhelm at the very beginning of poetry in England to the He-
brew psalms themselves.
We notice that a good deal of sacred literature is written in a
style full of puns and verbal echoes, in which the distinction in
rhythm between verse and prose is often hard to feel consistently.
The English translations of the Bible, especially the 1611, preserve
this oracular prose-verse rhythm admirably; the Hebrew puns of
course are another matter. TTie curious sing-song chant of the Koran
is a very pure example of oracular style, and the poetic ambigui-
ties of the Classical oracles are in the same convention. Such fea-
tures survive vestigially throughout religious poetry: in English from
Anglo-Saxon times to the opening of the fifth section of Ash
Wednesday, From what has been said it is clear that the oracle is
the germ or growing point of an oratorical prose rhythm as well.
The most obvious result of this is prayer, and prayer seems to re-
quire a rhetoric of parataxis, short phrases strung together in a
rhythm close to free verse.
In the more public type of religious lyric represented by the
Apollonian paean, the Hebrew psalm, the Christian hymn, or the
Hindu Vedas, the rhythms become more stately, simple, and
dignified, the 'T' of the poem is one of a visible community of
worshippers, and the syntax and diction become less ambiguous.
Here the emphasis is usually thrown on the objectivity and ascend-
ancy of the god, and the lyric reflects the sense of an external and
social discipline.
The narrative epos form corresponding to the psalm or hymn
presents a more connected account of the god. This myth has two
main parts: legend, recounting the god's biography or his former
dealings with his people; and the description of the ritual he re-
quires. Often the first leads up to, and provides an explanation for,
the second. The Homeric hymns are largely concerned with legend;
the Vedic hymns tend to subordinate the past legend to the present
ritual. One may compare the 'T'' nanative of creation with which
the Bible opens, and which, in the strophic form given it by the
THEORY OF GENRES
seven days of creation, has many of the characteristics of a hymn:
here the account of creation has the establishing of the Sabbath
as its climax. In contrast to the more rhapsodic or dithyrambic
forms that we shall deal with later, the desire of the worshipper in
the paean or psalm is not so much to be identified with his god
as to be identified as his worshipper.
Closely related to the hymn is the panegyrical ode to a human
representative of deity, whether hero or king. In some of the Hebrew
psalms, notably the 45th, the king is the intermediary figure out of
which the Messiah, the son of David who reaches the extreme
both of exaltation and of suffering for his people, develops. In Greek
literature, the Pindaric ode focusses on the victorious athlete who,
though a human figure, has the ritual link with deity brought
out by the mythology and legend incorporated into the ode. In
Roman times the honors paid to the Emperor and the state pro-
vided another focus for mythological panegyric, which continues
in the fourth eclogue of Virgil, the first of Calpurnius, and the
Carmen Saeculare of Horace. Later the chief form of panegvric
becomes the poem in praise of the Courtly Love mistress. The
panegyric is also one of the rhetorical prose forms, not one with a
very impressive literary record when its subject is a human being,
but capable of some flexibility in more impersonal directions. Prose
panegyrics of virtues or aspects of culture, notably poetry, appear
from time to time, often in the quasi-legal aspect of the apology or
defence. In poetry itself we have such forms as the St. Cecilia ode,
the panegyric of music. The epithalamium, the triumph, and
similar poems of festivity or procession are also species of panegyric.
As it is naturally a public convention, the panegyric is often in an
extended form which combines both lyric and epos characteristics.
In the panegyric the poet invites his reader to gaze with him at
something else. If this something else is not visibly present, we
have the poem of community, such as we get in patriotic verse of
all kinds. The poem of community brings us to the next cardinal
point of the lyric, defined earlier as the charm or response to some
kind of physical or quasi-physical compulsion— perhaps propulsion
is the word. One's education in this type of charm begins with
nursery rhymes, where the infant is swung or bounced to the
rhythm, or where the theme includes some form of affectionate
assault on the child. It continues through college yells, sing-songs,
and similar forms of participation mystique. The national anthem
FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
is another form which illustrates the close relationship to the poem
of community. In earlier societies we find work songs in peace and
battle songs in war, both with the same characteristics. Of epos
developments, the best known is the ballad, many features of which,
such as incremental repetition and the demand for attention with
which it often begins, are so close to the poem of community as to
have led some scholars to believe that its origin was in communal
composition. The cardinal point of oratorical prose corresponding
to the charm is the commandment or exhortation, and of the longer
prose forms founded on the exhortation the most highly developed
in Western literature is the sermon. Other forms will be mentioned
later.
Participation mystique is essentially spasmodic: in primitive com-
munities it may be sustained for hours by dance, and in decadent
ones by oratory, but in a state of culture it falls into the background.
For literature, the disappearance of the visible presence of panegyric
usually means the invisible presence of death. With the panegyrical
funeral ode we move from the conventions corresponding to the
dramatic auto to those corresponding to tragedy. Here we meet
first of all the elegy or threnody on the death of a hero, friend,
leader or mistress. Threnodies also show a strong tendency to
mythological expansion: the subject is not only idealized but often
exalted into a nature-spirit or dying god. The pastoral elegy, which
traditionally identifies its subject with Adonis, forms the con-
ventional center of the threnody. Some of Wordsworth's Lucy
poems indicate the capacity of even a very brief and simple elegy
to absorb such imagery. The corresponding form in oratorical prose
is the oraison funebrCj which survives in some forms of modern
obituary: here, as is natural for a prose medium, mythological ex-
pansion is less marked, and is often replaced by doctrinal or con-
ceptual expansion. A rare and difficult epos form, the tragic pane-
gyric, in which a hero is presented as a tragic figure as well as a
conquering hero, is represented by Marvell's ode on Cromwell and
by its prototype, the Regulus ode of Horace.
We come to a more isolated form of elegy in the convention of
the epitaph, in which the whole shape of a life is frequently indi-
cated. Epitaphs may vary in tone from the panegyrical to the
ribald, but even in the Greek Anthology they retain something of
their original function as markers, as something visibly set up to
arrest the passer-by and compel him to read. The corresponding
2g6
THEORY OF GENRES
epos form is the historical epitaph, the meditation over a vanished
past which has the same relation to the ruin that the individual
epitaph has to the gravestone. In prose there is the rhetorical
elegiac meditation represented in English by Browne's Urn Burial.
Still closer to irony is the complaint, the poem of exile, neglect
or protest at cruelty. Here the individual demanding attention,
unlike the corpse in the epitaph, is able to speak for himself, and
is of course usually represented as the poet himself. This theme
takes up most of the Courtly Love convention, where the central
archetype is the scornful and unrelenting mistress. Such a figure
is an ironic reversal of the original form of pastoral elegy. The
most logical person to lament the death of Adonis is Venus, though
she seldom does so in literature unless that specific myth is the
theme; but in most Courtly Love poetry the mistress is responsible
for all the lover's sufferings, including his death. We shall meet
this ambivalent female figure later in the essay. The complaint is
easily extended into epos forms, including narrative tragedies in
which the emotional focus is not the catastrophe but the lament
following the catastrophe, as in the two narrative poems of
Shakespeare.
The phase of tragic irony is represented by the poem of melan-
choly in its extreme form of accidia or ennui, where the individual
is so isolated as to feel his existence a living death. In Baudelaire's
geante the scornful mistress takes on a more deeply sinister tone,
and the theme of death is presented in terms of simple physical
dissolution: '"earth upon earth," as a medieval poem has it. The
appropriate epos form of this phase is the danse macabre, the poem
of the dying community.
Our next cardinal point is diEcult to name: we might almost
parody Hopkins's term and call it the poem of "outscape." It is
the lyrical counterpart of what in drama we call the mime, the
center of the irony which is common to tragedy and comedy. It is
a convention of pure projected detachment, in which an image, a
situation, or a mood is observed with all the imaginative energy
thrown outward to it and away from the poet. The word epigram
in its broadest sense defines some of its characteristics, except that
epigram as ordinarily used leans strongly in the direction of comedy
and satire. The lyrical poetry of China and Japan appears to be
based very largely on this convention, in striking contrast to West-
ern poetry, where epigram shows much more of a tendency to attach
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
emotions or make out a rhetorical case. Some of Shakespeare's son-
nets, such as 'The expense of spirit in a waste of shame," are ex-
ceptions.
The corresponding cardinal point of prose is the proverb or
aphorism, the germ of such forms as the wisdom literature of the
Bible. Here we are close to the counsel-of-prudence type of satire,
and at the opposite pole from the oracle. The proverb is a secular
or purely human oracle: it usually has the same rhetorical features,
alliteration, assonance, parallelism, that we find in the oracle, but
it is addressed to the detached consciousness and the critical wit.
Its authority comes from experience: for it, wisdom is the tried
and tested way; only folly seeks what is new, and the essential
virtues are prudence and moderation. The proverbs in Blake's
Marriage of Heaven and Hell are parody-proverbs, written from
the oracular or epiphanic point of view.
As we move into the conventions of satire, either in the lyric
forms of Hardy and Housman or the epos form of Dryden and
Pope, the features of epigram and proverb persist. Such poets pro-
duce brilliance and clarity rather than mystery or magic, and their
technique is concerned with concentration of sense. Two things
are essential to this: one is a tight metrical framework of words
stepping along in a sharply outlined order; the other is a clear state-
ment of what sound-patterns we may expect, such as the full ring
of the rhyming couplet. Additional or unexpected sound-patterns,
such as alliteration or assonance within the line, are kept to a
minimum, and the poetry follows Wordsworth's precept in being,
except for the metre, very like non-rhetorical prose in its diction.
The epos and prose forms of this phase, such as the epistle and
the formal satire, are naturally very close together.
In satire observation is still primary, but as the observed phe-
nomena move from the sinister to the grotesque, they grow more
illusory and unsubstantial. We note among epos forms a comic
counterpart of the danse macabre: the "testament" poem, of which
the best known English example is Swift's poem on his death.
Closely related to the testament convention are Donne's Anni-
versaries where the death of a girl expands into a general satire
or "anatomy"— this term will also meet us later.
We are now in the area corresponding to comedy, and still
within the vision of experience. The convention that marks a slight
removal from satire is the poem of paradox, i.e., the poem in which
298
THEORY OF GENRES
some form of paradox is the theme and not simply an incidental
feature of the technique. Naturally we find many of this type in
the “metaphysicaF" poetry which makes a regular use of a de-
liberately forced and consequently humorous conceit. Donne and
Herbert provide examples, and so does Emily Dickinson. The para-
dox is among other things often a paradox of feeling as well, so
that we are sometimes in doubt whether to ''take'' the poem seri-
ously or humorously. The paradox poem belongs in the comedy of
experience, near satire, because paradox in poetry is usually an ironic
treatment of quixotic love or religion, like the stylized Petrarchan
code of which Donne remarks "May barren angels love so," or the
vaunting virtue that ignominiously collapses into human nature in
some poems of Herbert. Another paradoxical treatment of the
Courtly Love convention is the pastourelle, or deadlocked love
dialogue. A closely related epos form, recalling the association of
comedy with law courts, is the debate, in which two sides of a
question are argued at length and then submitted to an umpire, who
often postpones or puts off the decision. Examples include The
Owl and the Nightingale, Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and
Spenser's Mutability Cantos.
A less ambiguous form of lyrical comedy is represented by the
carpe diem poem based on a moment of pleasure in experience.
The mood of such a poem is one of detachment, both subjective and
objective. The poet is usually, even when drunk, in full conscious
control, and the moment of pleasure itself is detached from time.
Most unqualified poems of joy are associated with some kind of
innocent vision, as in Blake: the great Epicurean poets, from
Horace to Herrick, accept the liniitations of joy in experience, its
transience in an abyss of "endless night." Even in Herrick there
are many features, such as the love of folklore and the imagery of
clothes, jewels and perfumes, which indicate an affinity with
masque rather than comedy. The limits of ordinary experience in
lyrical comedy are reached by the poem of the quiet mind, the
triumphant eiron or "settled low content," the serenity which
adjusts itself to experience and renounces the emotionally quixotic.
Wordsworth's formula of tranquil recollection marks his tendency
to remain within the state of experience, in contrast to most Ro-
mantics. The epos expression of serenity is frequently the descriptive
poem, where the poet climbs a hill and surveys a landscape below,
an imitation in experience of the point of epiphany. The poem of
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
the quiet mind, if it has a subject beyond recommending itself,
attempts to communicate to the reader a private and secret pos-
session, which brings us to the next cardinal point, the riddle.
The idea of the riddle is descriptive containment: the subject
is not described but circumscribed, a circle of words drawn around
it. In simple riddles, the central subject is an image, and the reader
feels impelled to guess, that is, to equate the poem to the name
or sign-symbol of its image. A slightly more complicated form of
riddle is the emblematic vision, probably one of the oldest forms of
human communication, where an example will be briefer than
description:
And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said,
A plumbline. Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumbline
in the midst of my people Israel.
Other prophets are represented as carrying symbolic apparatus
around with them, like Diogenes' lantern, a rhetorical device sur-
viving as late as Burke's dagger. Literary developments of the same
form include the emblem itself, to the tradition of which Blake's
tiger and sunflower and sick rose belong, and such pictorial conceit-
poems as Herbert's Pulley. The connection of the emblematic vi-
sion with the heraldic image of modern fiction is easy to see. In
symbolisme we have a third form of riddle where it is normally a
mood rather than an object that is contained. Here, too, as usually
happens in sophisticated developments, simpler elements in the
same tradition survive vestigially, like the riddling ''ptyx" in Mal-
larmd.
The riddle and emblematic vision are closely related to the cor-
responding cardinal point of prose, which is the parable or fable,
both of which are of course epos forms as well. The fable is the
simpler of the two forms, and nearer the simple riddle, the pro-
viding of the moral in the fable being the counterpart of guessing
the riddle. The parable is a more highly developed form with a
greater tendency to contain its own moral. In the fable, mythical
stylizing (talking animals and the like) is a regular feature of the
narrative; in the parable the stylizing is less obvious. Of the parables
of Jesus, only the parable of the sheep and goats, which is an apoca-
lypse, makes much use of material outside the realistic range of
credibility.
In Herrick's poems on primroses and daffodils we are still very
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THEORY OF GENRES
close to the fable and emblem tradition: so close that there is no
incongruity in ''reading a lecture'' from the primroses. Nevertheless
Herrick's daffodils, unlike Wordsworth's, are directly confronted,
and the confronted image readily becomes personified. Here we are
in the area corresponding to the masque in drama, and the innocent
vision and the fairyland of animistic romance return. The poem of
imaginative confrontation, where a close connection between the
poet's mood and the imagery is expressed by the personifying of
the imagery, is the genre of the Keats ode, the Grecian Urn being
the nearest to the emblem poem. The next step takes us into the
pastoral, where we come back to the mode of romance mentioned
in the first essay, pity and terror becoming modes of pleasure, usu-
ally the beautiful and the sublime respectively. These are generally
thought of as a contrast, as they are in Milton's wonderful diptych
of idyllic and pensive moods, but occasionally, as in some of the
"green" poems of Marvell, we have a poetry of absorption so com-
plete that the two moods seem blended into one.
But when the vision of innocence becomes unified, the contrast-
ing vision of experience often reappears, in a convention that we
might call the poem of expanded consciousness, where the poet
balances the catharsis of his view of experience with the ecstasis
of his view of a spiritual, invisible, or imaginative world. Here,
as in the corresponding forms of drama, we have not a direct
mimesis of life but a spectacular mimesis of it, able to look down
on experience because of the simultaneous presence of another
kind of vision. In drama this spectacular mimesis is attained by
the help of music as well as spectacle. Music and painting can-
not express the tragic or comic, which are verbal conceptions
only: they express moods which we may fit to tragedy or comedy
if we have some literary program ready for them. In our day the
most impressive examples of the poem of expanded consciousness
are the Eliot quartets and the Duino elegies of Rilke, and the
musical references of the one and the pictorial images of the other
express the close affinity of the genre with arts which, much more
obviously than poetry, do not speak.
The next convention we might call the recognition poem, the
poem which reverses the usual associations of dream and waking,
so that it is experience that seems to be the nightmare and the
vision that seems to be reality. The epos form of this convention
includes the medieval love vision, where we have again a spectacle
301
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
of a direct personal relation, attained by being placed in an extraor-
dinary world. Of lyrical forms, a very pure modern example, generi-
cally speaking, is Eliot's Marina, which is close to the correspond-
ing dramatic forms. Many of Rilke's Orpheus sonnets belong to it;
it is also the central convention of Vaughan and Traherne. This
theme is rare and difficult to handle in the rhythm of prose, but
we have it in the Centuries of Meditation, especially the famous
'The corn was orient and immortal wheat" passage.
A very important group of recognition poems are the poems of
self-recognition, where the poet himself is involved in the awaken-
ing from experience into a visionary reality. Examples include Col-
lins's Ode on the Poetical Character, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, and
Yeats's Tower and Sailing to Byzantium. This genre is near the
boundary line of our next and last group of themes, which bring us
back to the oracle again. These are the dithyrambic or rhapsodic
forms, where the poet feels taken possession of by some internal
and quasi-personal force. Nearest the poem of recognition is the
poem of iconic response, such as we have in some of the odes of
Crashaw; in Romantic times a more subjective and dithyrambic
form became very popular. Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, a good
deal of Swinburne, of Victor Hugo, of Nietzsche (who makes the
curious statement that he invented the dithyramb), of Blake's
prophecies, especially the ninth night of The Four Zoos, and the
two great poems of Smart, are examples. Most of these are epos
forms: the dithyrambic lends itself readily to recurring metre. Of
lyric forms, we may note the convention of the mad song, which
we have in Edgar's songs in King Lear, in Yeats's Crazy Jane poems,
and sporadically in a few other poets, including Scott. As the singer
of a mad song is usually a vagrant, he suggests a closer rapport with
mysterious beings and forces, such as nature-spirits, than normal
people have. On a more sophisticated level, where the poet suggests
the breaking of autonomous visions into his own mind, the illumi-
nations of Rimbaud may be mentioned.
As we come nearer to the oracular rhythm with which we began,
the rhythms of verse and prose begin to merge once more. We no-
tice in Whitman, for example, that there is a strong pause at the
end of every line— naturally enough, for where the rhythm is ir-
regular there is no point in a run-on line. The rhythm is approach-
ing a form in which the lyrical associative rhythm, the epos line
and the prose sentence are becoming much the same unit, a tend-
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THEORY OF GENRES
ency that we can observe in dithyrambic poetry as naive as Os-
sian's or as sophisticated as the modern French developments of
it that follow the Saison en Enfer.
SPECIFIC CONTINUOUS FORMS
(PROSE FICTION)
In assigning the term fiction to the genre of the written word,
in which prose tends to become the predominating rhythm, we col-
lide with the view that the real meaning of fiction is falsehood or
unreality. Thus an autobiography coming into a library would be
classified as non-fiction if the librarian believed the author, and
as fiction if she thought he was lying. It is difficult to see what use
such a distinction can be to a literary critic. Surely the word fiction,
which, like poetry, means etymologically something made for its
own sake, could be applied in criticism to any work of literary art
in a radically continuous form, which almost always means a work
of art in prose. Or, if that is too much to ask, at least some protest
can be entered against the sloppy habit of identifying fiction with
the one genuine form of fiction which we know as the novel.
Let us look at a few of the unclassified books lying on the bound-
ary of '*non-fiction'' and ''literature.'' Is Tristram Shandy a novel?
Nearly everyone would say yes, in spite of its easygoing disregard
of "story values." Is Gulliver's Travels a novel? Here most would
demur, including the Dewey decimal system, which puts it under
"Satire and Humor." But surely everyone would call it fiction, and
if it is fiction, a distinction appears between fiction as a genus and
the novel as a species of that genus. Shifting the ground to fiction,
then, is Sartor Resartus fiction? If not, why not? If it is, is The
Anatomy of Melancholy fiction? Is it a literary form or only a work
of "non-fiction" written with "style"? Is Borrow's Lavengro fiction?
Everyman's Library says yes; the World's Classics puts it under
"Travel and Topography."
The literary historian who identifies fiction with the novel is
greatly embarrassed by the length of time that the world managed
to get along without the novel, and until he reaches his great de-
liverance in Defoe, his perspective is intolerably cramped. He is com-
pelled to reduce Tudor fiction to a series of tentative essays in the
novel form, which works well enough for Deloney but makes non-
sense of Sidney. He postulates a great fictional gap in the seven-
teenth century which exactly covers the golden age of rhetorical
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
prose. He finally discovers that the word novel, which up to about
1900 was still the name of a more or less recognizable form, has
since expanded into a catchall term which can be applied to prac-
tically any prose book that is not ^'on^' something. Clearly, this
novel-centered view of prose fiction is a Ptolemaic perspective which
is now too complicated to be any longer workable, and some more
relative and Copernican view must take its place.
When we start to think seriously about the novel, not as fiction,
but as a form of fiction, we feel that its characteristics, whatever
they are, are such as make, say, Defoe, Fielding, Austen, and James
central in its tradition, and Borrow, Peacock, Melville, and Emily
Bronte somehow peripheral. This is not an estimate of merit: we
may think Moby Dick ''greater'' than The Egoist and yet feel that
Meredith's book is closer to being a typical novel. Fielding's con-
ception of the novel as a comic epic in prose seems fundamental to
the tradition he did so much to establish. In novels that we think
of as typical, like those of Jane Austen, plot and dialogue are closely
linked to the conventions of the comedy of manners. The conven-
tions of Wuthering Heights are linked rather with the tale and the
ballad. They seem to have more affinity with tragedy, and the tragic
emotions of passion and fury, which would shatter the balance of
tone in Jane Austen, can be safely accommodated here. So can the
supernatural, or the suggestion of it, which is difficult to get into a
novel. The shape of the plot is different: instead of manoeuvering
around a central situation, as Jane Austen does, Emily Bronte tells
her story with linear accents, and she seems to need the help of a
narrator, who would be absurdly out of place in Jane Austen. Con-
ventions so different justify us in regarding Wuthering Heights as
a different form of prose fiction from the novel, a form which we
shall here call the romance. Here again we have to use the same
word in several different contexts, but romance seems on the whole
better than tale, which appears to fit a somewhat shorter form.
The essential difference between novel and romance Jies in the
conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to
create "real people" so much as stylized figures which expand into
psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's
libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and vil-
lain respectively. That is why the romance so often radiates a glow
of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion
of allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes. Certain ele-
THEORY OF GENRES
merits of character are releas^ in the romance which make it nat-
urally a more revolutionary form than the novel. The novelist
deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or
social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many
of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussi-
ness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in
vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be,
something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out
of his pages.
The prose romance, then, is an independent form of fiction to
be distinguished from the novel and extracted from the miscel-
laneous heap of prose works now covered by that term. Even in
the other heap known as short stories one can isolate the tale form
used by Poe, which bears the same relation to the full romance
that the stories of Chekhov or Katherine Mansfield do to the novel.
"Pure” examples of either form are never found; there is hardly
any modern romance that could not be made out to be a novel, and
vice versa. The forms of prose fiction are mixed, like racial strains
m human beings, not separable like the sexes. In fact the popular
demand in fiction is always for a mixed form, a romantic novel
just romantic enough for the reader to project his libido on the
hero and his anima on the heroine, and just novel enough to keep
these projections in a familiar world. It may be asked, therefore,
what is the use of making the above distinction, especially when,
though undeveloped in criticism, it is by no means unrealized. It is
no surprise to hear that Trollope wrote novels and William Morris
romances.
The reason is that a great romancer should be examined in terms
of the conventions he chose. William Morris should not be left
on the side lines of prose fiction merely because the critic has not
learned to take the romance form seriously. Nor, in view of what
has been said about the revolutionary nature of the romance, should
his choice of that form be regarded as an “escape” from his social
attitude. If Scott has any claims to be a romancer, it is not good
criticism to deal only with his defects as a novelist. The romantic
qualities of The Pilgrim's Progress, too, its archetypal characteriza-
tion and its revolutionary approach to religious experience, make
it a well-rounded example of a literary form: it is not merely a
hook swallowed by English literature to get some religious bulk in
its diet. Finally, when Hawthorne, in the preface to The House of
FOURTH ESSAY; RHETORICAL CRITICISM
the Seven Gables^ insists that his story should be read as romance
and not as novel, it is possible that he meant what he said, even
though he indicates that the prestige of the rival form has induced
the romancer to apologize for not using it.
Romance is older than the novel, a fact which has developed the
historical illusion that it is something to be outgrown, a juvenile
and undeveloped form. The social afiEnities of the romance, with
its grave idealizing of heroism and purity, are with the aristocracy
(for the apparent inconsistency of this with the revolutionary na-
ture of the form just mentioned, see the introductory comment on
the mythos of romance in the previous essay) . It revived in the pe-
riod we call Romantic as part of the Romantic tendency to archaic
feudalism and a cult of the hero, or idealized libido. In England
the romances of Scott and, in less degree, the Brontes, are part of a
mysterious Northumbrian renaissance, a Romantic reaction against
the new industrialism in the Midlands, which also produced the
poetry of Wordsworth and Burns and the philosophy of Carlyle.
It is not surprising, therefore, that an important theme in the more
bourgeois novel should be the parody of the romance and its ideals.
The tradition established by Don Quixote continues in a type of
novel which looks at a romantic situation from its own point of
view, so that the conventions of the two forms make up an ironic
compound instead of a sentimental mixture. Examples range from
Northanger Abbey to Madame Bovary and Lord Jim.
The tendency to allegory in the romance may be conscious, as
in The Filgrim's Progress, or unconscious, as in the very obvious
sexual mythopoeia in William Morris. The romance, which deals
with heroes, is intermediate between the novel, which deals with
men, and the myth, which deals with gods. Prose romance first ap-
pears as a late development of Classical mythology, and the prose
Sagas of Iceland follow close on the mythical Eddas. The novel
tends rather to expand into a fictional approach to history. The
soundness of Fielding's instinct in calling Tom Jones a history is
confirmed by the general rule that the larger the scheme of a novel
becomes, the more obviously its historical nature appears. As it is
creative history, however, the novelist usually prefers his material
in a plastic, or roughly contemporary state, and feels cramped by a
fixed historical pattern. Waverley is dated about sixty years back
from the time of writing and Little Dorrit about forty years, but
the historical pattern is fixed in the romance and plastic in the
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THEORY OF GENRES
novel, suggesting the general principle that most “historical novels''
are romances. Similarly a novel becomes more romantic in its ap-
peal when the life it reflects has passed away: thus the novels of
Trollope were read primarily as romances during the Second World
War. It is perhaps the link with history and a sense of temporal con-
text that has confined the novel, in striking contrast to the world-
wide romance, to the alliance of time and Western man.
Autobiography is another form which merges with the novel by
a series of insensible gradations. Most autobiographies are inspired
by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those
events and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an
integrated pattern. This pattern may be something larger than him-
self with which he has come to identify himself, or simply the co-
herence of his character and attitudes. We may call this very im-
portant form of prose fiction the confession form, following St.
Augustine, who appears to have invented it, and Rousseau, who
established a modern type of it. The earlier tradition gave Religio
Medici, Grace Abounding, and Newman's Apologia to English
literature, besides the related but subtly different type of confession
favored by the mystics.
Here again, as with the romance, there is some value in recogniz-
ing a distinct prose form in the confession. It gives several of our
best prose works a definable place in fiction instead of keeping
them in a vague limbo of books which are not quite literature be-
cause they are “thought," and not quite religion or philosophy
because they are Exaiyples of Prose Style. The confession, too, like
the novel and the romance, has its own short form, the familiar es-
say, and Montaigne's livre de bonne foy is a confession made up of
essays in which only the contmuous narrative of the longer form is
missing. Montaigne's scheme is to the confession what a work of
fiction made up of short stories, such as Joyce's Dubliners or Boc-
caccio's Decameron, is to the novel or romance.
After Rousseau— in fact in Rousseau— the confession flows into
the novel, and the mixture produces the fictional autobiography,
the Kilnstler-roman, and kindred types. There is no literary reason
why the subject of a confession should always be the author him-
self, and dramatic confessions have been used in the novel at least
since Moll Flanders, The “stream of consciousness" technique per-
mits of a much more concentrated fusion of the two forms, but
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
even here the characteristics peculiar to the confession form show
up clearly. Nearly always some theoretical and intellectual interest
in religion, politics, or art plays a leading role in the confession. It
is his success in integrating his mind on such subjects that makes
the author of a confession feel that his life is worth writing about.
But this interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the
genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dis-
solve all theory into personal relationships. In Jane Austen, to take
a familiar instance, church, state, and culture are never examined
except as social data, and Henry James has been described as having
a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. The novelist who can-
not get along without ideas, or has not the patience to digest them
in the way that James did, instinctively resorts to what Mill calls
a ''mental history” of a single character. And when we find that a
technical discussion of a theory of aesthetics forms the climax of
Joyce’s Portraity we realize that what makes this possible is the
presence in that novel of another tradition of prose fiction.
The novel tends to be extroverted and personal; its chief interest
is in human character as it manifests itself in society. The romance
tends to be introverted and personal: it also deals with characters,
but in a more subjective way. (Subjective here refers to treatment,
not subject-matter. The characters of romance are heroic and there-
fore inscrutable; the novelist is freer to enter his characters’ minds
because he is more objective.) The confession is also introverted,
but intellectualized in content. Our next step is evidently to dis-
cover a fourth form of fiction which is extroverted and intellectual.
We remarked earlier that most people would call GulliyePs Trav-
els fiction but not a novel. It must then be another form of fiction,
as it certainly has a form, and we feel that we are turhing from the
novel to this form, whatever it is, when we turn from Rousseau’s
Emile to Voltaire’s Candide, or from Butler’s The Way of All
Flesh to the Erewhon books, or from Huxley’s Point Counterpoint
to Brave New World. The form thus has its own traditions, and,
as the examples of Butler and Huxley show, has preserved some
integrity even under the ascendancy of the novel. Its existence is
easy enough to demonstrate, and no one will challenge the state-
ment that the literary ancestry of Gulliver* s Travels and Candide
runs through Rabelais and Erasmus to Lucian. But while much
has been said about the style and thought of Rabelais, Swift, and
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THEORY OF GENRES
Voltaire, very little has been made of them as craftsmen working in
a specific medium, a point no one dealing with a novelist would
Ignore. Another great writer in this tradition, Huxley's master Pea-
cock, has fared even worse, for, his form not being understood, a
general impression has grown up that his status in the development
of prose fiction is that of a slapdash eccentric. Actually, he is as
exquisite and precise an artist in his medium as Jane Austen is in
hers.
The form used by these authors is the Menippean satire, also
more rarely called the Varronian satire, allegedly invented by a
Greek cynic named Menippus. His works are lost, but he had two
great disciples, the Greek Lucian and the Roman Varro, and the
tradition of Varro, who has not survived either except in fragments,
was canied on by Petronius and Apuleius. The Menippean satire
appears to have developed out of verse satire through the practice
of adding prose interludes, but we know it only as a prose form,
though one of its recurrent features (seen in Peacock) is the use of
incidental verse.
The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with
mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusi-
asts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are
handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct
from their social behavior, The Menippean satire thus resembles
the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories,
and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized
rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the
ideas they represent. Here again no sharp boundary lines can or
should be drawn, but if we compare a character in Jane Austen with
a similar character in Peacock we can immediately feel the dif-
ference between the two forms. Squire Western belongs to the
novel, but Thwackum and Square have Menippean blood in them.
A constant theme in the tradition is the ridicule of the philosophus
gloriosus, already discussed. The novelist sees evil and folly as social
diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the in-
tellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry which the philosophus gloru
osus at once symbolizes and defines.
Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire all use a loose-
jointed narrative form often confused with the romance. It differs
from the romance, however (though there is a strong admixture of
romance in Rabelais), as it is not primarily concerned with the ex-
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
ploits of heroes, but relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and
the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature. It dif-
fers also from the picaresque form, which has the novehs interest
in the actual structure of society. At its most concentrated the
Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms
of a single intellectual pattern. The intellectual structure built up
from the story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic
of narrative, though the appearance of carelessness that results re-
flects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge
by a novel-centered conception of fiction.
The word “satire,’' in Roman and Renaissance times, meant
either of two specific literary forms of that name, one (this one)
prose and the other verse. Now it means a structural principle or
attitude, what we have called a mythos. In the Menippean satires
we have been discussing, the name of the form also applies to the
attitude. As the name of an attitude, satire is, we have seen, a
combination of fantasy and morality. But as the name of a form,
the term satire, though confined to literature (for as a mythos
it may appear in any art, a cartoon, for example), is more flexible,
and can be either entirely fantastic or entirely moral. The Menip-
pean adventure story may thus be pure fantasy, as it is in the literary
fairy tale. The Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is
The Water-Bahies, which has been influenced by Rabelais. The
purely moral type is a serious vision of society as a single intellectual
pattern, in other words a Utopia.
The short form of the Menippean satire is usually a dialogue or
colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas
rather than of character. This is the favorite form of Erasmus, and
is common in Voltaire. Here again the form is not invariably satiric
in attitude, but shades off into more purely fanciful or moral dis-
cussions, like the Imaginary Conversations of Landor or the “dia-
logue of the dead." Sometimes this form expands to full length,
and more than two speakers are used: the setting then is usually a
cena or symposium, like the one that looms so large in Petronius.
Plato, though much earlier in the field than Menippus, is a strong
influence on this type, which stretches in an unbroken tradition
down through those urbane and leisurely conversations which de-
fine the ideal courtier in Castiglione or the doctrine and discipline
of angling in Walton. A modern development produces the coun-
try-house weekends in Peacock, Huxley, and their imitators in which
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THEORY OF GENRES
the opinions and ideas and cultural interests expressed are as im-
portant as the love-making.
The novelist shows his exuberance either by an exhaustive analy-
sis of human relationships, as in Henry James, or of social phe-
nomena, as in Tolstoy. The Menippean satirist, dealing with in-
tellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual
ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme
or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their
own jargon. A species, or rather sub-species, of the form is the kind
of encyclopaedic farrago represented by Athenaeus' Deipnosophists
and Macrobius’ Saturnalia, where people sit at a banquet and pour
out a vast mass of erudition on every subject that might conceivably
come up in a conversation. The display of erudition had probably
been associated with the Menippean tradition by Varro, who was
enough of a polymath to make Quintilian, if not stare and gasp,
at any rate call him vir RomanoTum eruditissimus. The tendency
to expand into an encyclopaedic farrago is clearly marked in Rabe-
lais, notably in the great catalogues of torcheculs and epithets of
codpieces and methods of divination. The encyclopaedic compila-
tions produced in the line of duty by Erasmus and Voltaire suggest
that a magpie instinct to collect facts is not unrelated to the type
of ability that has made them famous as artists. Flaubert's encyclo-
paedic approach to the construction of Bouvard et Pecuchet is quite
comprehensible if we explain it as marking an afhnity with the
Menippean tradition.
This creative treatment of exhaustive erudition is the organizing
principle of the greatest Menippean satire in English before Swift,
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Here human society is studied
in terms of the intellectual pattern provided by the conception of
melancholy, a symposium of books replaces dialogue, and the result
is the most comprehensive survey of human life in one book that
English literature had seen since Chaucer, one of Burton's favorite
authors. We may note in passing the Utopia in his introduction and
his ''digressions," which when examined turn out to be scholarly dis-
tillations of Menippean forms: the digression of air, of the marvel-
lous journey; the digression of spirits, of the ironic use of erudition;
the digression of the miseries of scholars, of the satire on the
philosophus gloriosus. The word "anatomy" in Burton's title means
a dissection or analysis, and expresses very accurately the intel-
lectualized approach of his form. We may as well adopt it as a
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FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
convenient name to replace the cumbersome and in modern times
rather misleading ''Menippean satire.”
The anatomy, of course, eventually begins to merge with the
novel, producing various hybrids including the roman a these and
novels in which the characters are symbols of social or other ideas,
like the proletarian novels of the thirties in this century. It was
Sterne, however, the disciple of Burton and Rabelais, who com-
bined them with greatest success. Tristram Shandy may be, as was
said at the beginning, a novel, but the digressing narrative, the
catalogues, the stylizing of character along ‘"humor” lines, the
marvellous journey of the great nose, the symposium discussions,
and the constant ridicule of philosophers and pedantic critics are
all features that belong to the anatomy.
A clearer understanding of the form and traditions of the anato-
my would make a good many elements in the history of literature
come into focus. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, with its
dialogue form, its verse interludes and its pervading tone of con-
templative irony, is a pure anatomy, a fact of considerable im-
portance for the understanding of its vast influence. The Compleat
Angler is an anatomy because of its mixture of prose and verse,
its rural cena setting, its dialogue form, its deipnosophistical interest
in food, and its gentle Menippean raillery of a society which con-
siders everything more important than fishing and yet has discov-
ered very few better things to do. In nearly every period of literature
there are many romances, confessions, and anatomies that are
neglected only because the categories to which they belong are
unrecognized. In the period between Sterne and Peacock, for
example, we have, among romances, Melmoth the Wanderer;
among confessions, Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner; among
anatomies, Southey's Doctor, Amory's John Buncle, and the Nodes
Ambrosianae.
To sum up then: when we examine fiction from the point of view
of form, we can see four chief strands binding it together, novel,
confession, anatomy, and romance. The six possible combinations
of these forms all exist, and we have shown how the novel has
combined with each of the other three. Exclusive concentration
on one form is rare: the early novels of George Eliot, for instance,
are influenced by the romance, and the later ones by the anatomy.
The romance-confession hybrid is found, naturally, in the auto-
THEORY OF GENRES
biography of a romantic temperament, and is represented in Eng-
lish by the extroverted George Borrow and the introverted De
Quincey. The romance-anatomy one we have noticed in Rabelais;
a later example is Moby Dick, where the romantic theme of the
wild hunt expands into an encyclopaedic anatomy of the whale.
Confession and anatomy are united in Sartor Resartus and in some
of Kierkegaard's strikingly original experiments in prose fiction
form, including Either/Or. More comprehensive fictional schemes
usually employ at least three forms: we can see strains of novel,
romance, and confession in Pamela, of novel, romance, and
anatomy in Don Quixote, of novel, confession, and anatomy in
Proust, and of romance, confession, and anatomy in Apuleius.
I deliberately make this sound schematic in order to suggest the
advantage of having a simple and logical explanation for the form
of, say, Moby Dick or Tristram Shandy. The usual critical approach
to the form of such works resembles that of the doctors in Brob-
dingnag, who after great wrangling finally pronounced Gulliver a
lusus naturae. It is the anatomy in particular that has baffled
critics, and there is hardly any fiction writer deeply influenced by
it who has not been accused of disorderly conduct. The reader may
be reminded here of Joyce, for describing Joyce's books as mon-
strous has become a nervous tic. I find ''demogorgon," “behemoth,"
and “white elephant" in good critics; the bad ones could probably
do much better. The care that Joyce took to organize Ulysses and
Finnegans Wake amounted nearly to obsession, but as they are
not organized on familiar principles of prose fiction, the impression
of shapelessness remains. Let us try our formulas on him.
If a reader were asked to set down a list of the things that had
most impressed him about Ulysses, it might reasonably be some-
what as follows. First, the clarity with which the sights and sounds
and smells of Dublin come to life, the rotundity of the character-
drawing, and the naturalness of the dialogue. Second, the elaborate
way that the story and characters are parodied by being set against
archetypal heroic patterns, notably the one provided by the
Odyssey. Third, the revelation of character and incident through
the searching use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Fourth,
the constant tendency to be encyclopaedic and exhaustive both in
technique and in subject matter, and to see both in highly intel-
lectualized terms. It should not be too hard for us by now to see
that these four points describe elements in the book which relate to
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FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
the novel, romance, confession, and anatomy respectively. Ulysses,
then, is a complete prose epic with all four forms employed in it,
all of practically equal importance, and all essential to one another,
so that the book is a unity and not an aggregate.
This unity is built up from an intricate scheme of parallel con-
trasts. The romantic archetypes of Hamlet and Ulysses are like
remote stars in a literary heaven looking down quizzically on the
shabby creatures of Dublin obediently intertwining themselves in
the patterns set by their influences. In the "'Cyclops'' and "Circe''
episodes particularly there is a continuous parody of realistic pat-
terns by romantic ones which reminds us, though the irony leans
in the opposite direction, of Madame Bovary. The relation of
novel and confession techniques is similar; the author jumps into
his characters' minds to follow their stream of consciousness, and
out again to describe them externally. In the novel-anatomy com-
bination, too, found in the "Ithaca" chapter, the sense of lurking
antagonism between the personal and intellectual aspects of the
scene accounts for much of its pathos. The same principle of
parallel contrast holds good for the other three combinations: of
romance and confession in "Nausicaa" and "Penelope," of con-
fession and anatomy in "Proteus" and "The Lotos-Eaters," of
romance and anatomy (a rare and fitful combination) in "Sirens"
and parts of "Circe."
In Finnegans Wake the unity of design goes far beyond this.
Tire dingy story of the sodden HCE and his pinched wife is not
contrasted with the archetypes of Tristram and the divine king:
HCE is himself Tristram and the divine king. As the setting is a
dream, no contrast is possible between confession and novel, be-
tween a stream of consciousness inside the mind and the appear-
ances of other people outside it. Nor is the experiential world of
the novel to be separated from the intelligible world of the anatomy.
The forms we have been isolating in fiction, and which depend for
their existence on the commonsense dichotomies of the daylight
consciousness, vanish in Finnegans Wake into a fifth and quintes-
sential form. This form is the one traditionally associated with
scriptures and sacred books, and treats life in terms of the fall and
awakening of the human soul and the creation and apocalypse of
nature. The Bible is the definitive example of it; the Egyptian
Book of the Dead and the Icelandic Prose Edda, both of which
have left deep imprints on Finnegans Wake, also belong to it.
THEORY OF GENRES
SPECIFIC ENCYCLOPAEDIC FORMS
We met in the first essay the principle that in every age of
literature there tends to be some kind of central encyclopaedic
form, which is normally a scripture or sacred book in the mythical
mode, and some ''analogy of revelation,’' as we called it, in the
other modes. In our culture the central sacred book is the Christian
Bible, which is also probably the most systematically constructed
sacred book in the world. To say that the Bible is "more” than a
work of literature is merely to say that other methods of approach-
ing it are possible. No book could have had its influence on litera-
ture without itself having literary qualities, and the Bible is a work
of literature as long as it is being examined by a literary critic.
Tlae absence of any genuinely literary criticism of the Bible in
modern times (until very recently) has left an enormous gap in
our knowledge of literary symbolism as a whole, a gap which all
the new knowledge brought to bear on it is quite incompetent to
fill. I feel that historical scholarship is without exception "lower”
or analytic criticism, and that "higher” criticism would be a quite
different activity. The latter seems to me to be a purely literary
criticism which would see the Bible, not as the scrapbook of cor-
ruptions, glosses, redactions, insertions, conflations, misplacings,
and misunderstandings revealed by the analytic critic, but as the
typological unity which all these things were originally intended
to help construct. The tremendous cultural influence of the Bible
is inexplicable by any criticism of it which stops where it begins
to look like something with the literary form of a specialist’s stamp
collection. A genuine higher criticism of the Bible, therefore, would
be a synthetizing process which would start with the assumption
that the Bible is a definitive myth, a single archetypal structure
extending from creation to apocalypse. Its heuristic principle would
be St. Augustine’s axiom that the Old Testament is revealed in
the New and the New concealed in the Old: that the two testa-
ments are not so much allegories of one another as metaphorical
identifications of one another. We cannot trace the Bible back,
even historically, to a time when its materials were not being
shaped into a typological unity, and if the Bible is to be regarded
as inspired in any sense, sacred or secular, its editorial and redacting
processes must be regarded as inspired too.
This is the only way in which we can deal with the Bible as
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
the major informing influence on literary symbolism which it ac-
tually has been. Such an approach would be a conservative criticism
recovering and re-establishing the traditional typologies based on
the assumption of its figurative unity. The historical critic of the
Song of Songs, for instance, is largely concerned with fertility cults
and village festivals: the cultural criticism of it would concern
itself mainly with the developments of its symbolism in Dante,
Bernard of Clairvaux and other mystics and poets, for whom it
represented the love of Christ for his Church. This latter is not
an allegory inappropriately stuck on to the poem, but the larger
archetypal or cultural context of interpretation into which it has
been fitted. There is no need to choose between the two types of
criticism; no need to regard the book's literary career as the result
of a prudish distortion or over-imaginative mistake; no need to treat
the view of it as a voluptuous orientale as a modern and an ironic
discovery.
Once our view of the Bible comes into proper focus, a great mass
of literary symbols from The Dream of the Rood to Little Gidding
begins to take on meaning. We are concerned at present with the
heroic quest of the central figure called the Messiah, who is asso-
ciated with various royal figures in the Old Testament and identified
with Christ in the New. The stages and symbols of this quest have
been dealt with under the mythos of romance. A mysterious birth
is followed by an epiphany or recognition as God's son; symbols
of humiliation, betrayal, and martyrdom, the so-called suffering
servant complex, follow, and in their turn are succeeded by sym-
bols of the Messiah as bridegroom, as conqueror of a monster, and
as the leader of his people into their rightful home. The oracles of
the original prophets appear to have been mainly if not entirely
denunciatory, but they have been furnished with “post-exilic"
sequels which help to infuse the whole Bible with the rhythm of
the total cyclical mythos in which disaster is followed by restoration,
humiliation by prosperity, and which we find in epitome in the
stories of J-ob and the prodigal son.
The Bible as a whole, therefore, presents a gigantic cycle from
creation to apocalypse, within which is the heroic quest of the
Messiah from incarnation to apotheosis. Within this again are
three other cyclical movements, expressed or implied: individual
from birth to salvation; sexual from Adam and Eve to the apoca-
lyptic wedding; social from the giving of the law to the established
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THEORY OF GENRES
kingdom of the law, the rebuilt Zion of the Old Testament and the
millennium of the New. These are all completed or dialectic cycles,
where the movement is first down and then up to a permanently
redeemed world. In addition there is the ironic or ''all too human^^
cycle, the mere cycle of human life without redemptive assistance,
which goes recurrently through the "same dull round,'' in Blake's
phrase, from birth to death. Here the final cadence is one of
bondage, exile, continuing war, or destruction by fire (Sodom,
Babylon) or water (the flood). These two forms of cyclical move-
ment supply us with two epic frameworks: the epic of return and
the epic of wrath. The fact that the cycle of life and death and
rebirth is closely analogous in its symbolism to the Messianic cycle
of pre-existence, life-in-death and resurrection gives us a third type
of analogical epic. A fourth type is the contrast-epic, where one
pole is the ironic human situation and the other the origin or con-
tinuation of a divine society.
Even in myth the full apocalyptic cadence is rare, though it
occurs in Northern mythology, in the Eddas and the Muspilli, and
the last book of the Mahabharata is an entry into heaven. There
are myths of apotheosis, as in the legend of Hercules, and of salva-
tion, as in the Osiris symbolism of the Book of the Dead, but the
main concern of most sacred books is to lay down the law, chiefly
of course the ceremonial law. The resulting shape is an embryonic
form of contrast-epic: myths accounting for the origin of law, in-
cluding creation myths, are at one pole and human society under
the law is at the other. The antiquity of the contrast-epic is indi-
cated by the epic of Gilgamesh, where the hero's search for im-
mortality leads him only to hear about the end of the natural cycle,
symbolized here, as in the Bible, by a flood. The collections of
myth made by Hesiod and Ovid are based on the same form: here
the poet himself, a victim of injustice or exile, has a prominent
place at the human pole. The same structure is carried on through
Boethius, where the two poles are the lost golden age. and the
poet in prison falsely accused, into medieval times.
Romantic encyclopaedic forms use human or sacrarnental imi-
tations of the Messianic myth, like the quest of Dante in the
Commedia, of St. George in Spenser, and of the knights of the
Holy Grail. The Commedia reverses the usual structure of the
contrast-epic, as it starts with the ironic human situation and
ends with divine vision. The human nature of Dante’s quest is
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FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
established by the fact that he is unable to overcome or even to face
the monsters who confront him at the beginning: his quest thus
begins in a retreat from the conventional knight-errant role. In
Langland's great vision we have the first major English treatment
of the contrast-epic. At one pole is the risen Christ and the salva-
tion of Piers: at the other is the somber vision of human life which
presents at the end of the poem something very like a triumph of
Antichrist. The Faerie Queene was to have ended with an epitha-
lamium, which would probably have been filled with Biblical bride-
groom imagery, but as we have it the poem ends with the Blatant
Beast of calumny still at large and the poet a victim of it.
In the high mimetic we reach the structure that we think of as
typically epic, the form represented by Homer, Virgil, and Milton.
The epic differs from the narrative in the encyclopaedic range of
its theme, from heaven to the underworld, and over an enormous
mass of traditional knowledge. A narrative poet, a Southey or a
Lydgate, may write any number of narratives, but an epic poet
normally completes only one epic structure, the moment when he
decides on his theme being the crisis of his life.
The cyclical form of the Classical epic is based on the natural
cycle, a mediterranean known world in the middle of a boundless-
ness (apeiron) and between the upper and the lower gods. The
cycle has two main rhythms: the life and death of the individual,
and the slower social rhythm which, in the course of years {peri-
plomenon eniauton in Homer, yolvibus or labentibus annis in
Virgil), brings cities and empires to their rise and fall. The steady
vision of the latter movement is possible only to gods. The con-
vention of beginning the action in medias res ties a knot in time,
so to speak. The total action in the background of the Iliad naoves
from the cities of Greece through the ten-year siege of Troy back
to Greece again; the total action of the Odyssey is a specialized
example of the same thing, rnoving from Ithaca back to Ithaca.
The Aeneid moves with the household gods of Priam, from Troy
to New Troy.
The foreground action begins at a point described in the Odyssey
as harnoihen, ''somewhere'': actually, it is far more carefully chosen.
All three epics begin at a kind of nadir of the total cyclical action:
the Iliad, at a moment of despair in the Greek camp; the Odyssey,
with Odysseus and Penelope furthest from one another, both
wooed by importunate suitors; the Aeneid, with its hero ship-
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THEORY OF GENRES
wrecked on the shores of Carthage, citadel of Juno and enemy of
Rome. From there, the action moves both backward and forward
far enough to indicate the general shape of the historical cycle.
The discovery of the epic action is the sense of the end of the
total action as like the beginning, and hence of a consistent order
and balance running through the whole. This consistent order is
not a divine fiat or fatalistic causation, but a stability in nature
controlled by the gods, and extended to human beings if they ac-
cept it. The sense of this stability is not necessarily tragic, but it
is the kind of sense that makes tragedy possible.
It does so in the Iliad, for example. The number of valid reasons
for praising the Iliad would fill a bigger book than this, but the
relevant reason for us here is the fact that its theme is menis, a
song of wrath. It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance
for Western literature of the Iliad*s demonstration that the fall
of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic and not
comic. With the Iliad, once for all, an objective and disinterested
element enters into the poet's vision of human life. Without this
element, poetry is merely instrumental to various social aims, to
propaganda, to amusement, to devotion, to instruction: with it, it
acquires the authority that since the Iliad it has never lost, an
authority based, like the authority of science, on the vision of
nature as an impersonal order.
The Odyssey begins the other tradition of the epic of return. The
story is a romance of a hero escaping safely from incredible perils
and arriving in the nick of time to claim his bride and bafHe the
villains, but our central feeling about it is a much more prudent
sense, rooted in all our acceptance of nature, society, and law, of
the proper master of the house coming to reclaim his own. The
Aeneid develops the theme of return into one of rebirth, the end
in New Troy being the starting-point renewed and transformed by
the hero's quest. The Christian epic carries the same themes into
a wider archetypal context. The action of the Bible, from the
poetic point of view, includes the themes of the three great epics:
the theme of the destruction and captivity of the city in the Iliad,
the theme of the nostos or return home in the Odyssey, and the
theme of the building of the new city in the Aeneid. Adam is, like
Odysseus, a man of wrath, exiled from home because he angered
God by going hyper moron, beyond his limit as a man. In both
stories the provoking act is symbolized by the eating of food re-
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FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
served for deity. As with Odysseus, Adam's return home is con-
tingent on the appeasing of divine wrath by divine wisdom (Po-
seidon and Athene reconciled by the will of Zeus in Homer; the
Father reconciled with man in the Christian atonement). Israel
carries its ark from Egypt to the Promised Land just as Aeneas
carries his household goods from the fallen Troy to the eternally
established one.
Hence there is, as we go from the Classical to the Christian epic,
a progress in completeness of theme (not in any kind of value), as
Milton indicates in such phrases as ''Beyond the Aonian mount."
In Milton the foreground action of the epic is again the nadir of
the total cyclical action, the fall of Satan and Adam. From there
the action works backward through the speech of Raphael, and
forward through the speech of Michael, to the beginning and
end of the total action. The beginning is God's presence among the
angels before the Son is manifested to them; the end comes after
the apocalypse when God again is "all in all," but the beginning
and end are the same point, the presence of God, renewed and
transformed by the heroic quest of Christ. As a Christian, Milton
has to reconsider the epic theme of heroic action, to decide what
in Christian terms a hero is and what an act is. Heroism for him
consists in obedience, fidelity and perseverance through ridicule or
persecution, and is exemplified by Abdiel, the faithful angel. Ac-
tion for him means positive or creative act, exemplified by Christ
in the creation of the world and the recreation of man. Satan thus
takes over the traditional qualities of martial heroism: he is the
wrathful Achilles, the cunning Ulysses, the knight-errant who
achieves the perilous quest of chaos; but he is from God's point of
view a mock-hero, what man in his fallen state naturally turns to
with admiration as the idolatrous form of the kingdom, the power,
and the glory.
In the low mimetic period the encyclopaedic structure tends to
become either subjective and mythological, or objective and his-
torical. The former is usually expressed in epos and the latter in
prose fiction. The main attempts to combine the two were made,
somewhat unexpectedly, in France, and extend from the fragments
left by Chenier to Victor Hugo's Ldgendes des Siecles, Here the
theme of heroic action is transferred, consistently with low mimetic
conventions, from the leader to humanity as a whole. Hence the
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THEORY OF GENRES
fulfilment of the action is conceived mainly as social improvement
in the future.
In the traditional epic the gods affect the action from a con-
tinuous present: Athene and Venus appear epiphanically, on defi-
nite occasions, to illuminate or cheer the hero at that moment. To
gain information about the future, or what is “ahead'' in terms
of the lower cycle of life, it is normally necessary to descend to
a lower world of the dead, as is done in the nekyia, or katabasis,
in the eleventh book of the Odyssey and the sixth of the Aeneid.
Similarly in Dante the damned know the future but not the
present, and in Milton the forbidden knowledge which ''brought
death into the world” is actualized in the form of Michael's
prophecy of the future. We are thus not surprised to find a great
increase, in the low mimetic period of future hopes, of a sense
of Messianic powers as coming from “underneath” or through
esoteric and hermetic traditions. Prometheus Unbound is the most
familiar English example: the attempt to insert a katabasis into
the second part of Faust, first as the descent to the “mothers” and
then as the Classical Walpurgis Night, was evidently one of the
most baffling structural problems in that work. Sometimes, how-
ever, the katabasis is combined with and complemented by the
more traditional point of epiphany, Keats's Endymion goes “down”
in search of truth and “up” in search of beauty, discovering, not
surprisingly for Keats, that truth and beauty are the same. In
Hyperion some alignment between a Dionysian “below” and an
Apollonian “above” was clearly on the agenda. Eliot's Burnt
Norton is founded on the principle that “the way up and the way
down are the same,” which resolves this dichotomy in Christian
terms. Time in this world is a horizontal line, and God's timeless
presence is a vertical one crossing it at right angles, the crossing
point being the Incarnation. The rose garden and subway episodes
outline the two semi-circles of the cycle of nature, the upper one
the romantic mythopoeic fantasy world of innocence and the lower
the world of experience. But if we go further up than the rose
garden and further down than the subway we reach the same point.
Comedy and irony supply us with parody-symbolism, of which
the relation of the bound Gulliver in Lilliput to Prometheus, of the
staggering hod-carrier in Finnegans Wake to Adam, of the made-
leine cake in Proust to the Eucharist, are examples on varying levels
of seriousness. Here too belongs the kind of use of archetypal striic-
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FOURTH essay: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
ture made in Ahsdlom end Achitophel, where the resemblance
between the story and its Old Testament model is treated as a
series of witty coincidences. The theme of encyclopaedic parody is
endemic in satire, and in prose fiction is chiefly to be found in the
anatomy, the tradition of Apuleius and Rabelais and Swift. Satires
and novels show a relation corresponding to that of epics and narra-
tives: the more novels a novelist writes the more successful he is^
but Rabelais, Burton, and Sterne build their creative lives around
one supreme effort. Hence it is in satire and irony that we should
look for the continuing encyclopaedic tradition, and we should
expect that the containing form of the ironic or satiric epic would
be the pure cycle, in which every quest, however successful or
heroic, has sooner or later to be made over again.
In Blake's poem The Mental Traveller we have a vision of the
cycle of human life, from birth to death to rebirth. The two charac-
ters of the poem are a male and a female figure, moving in opposite
directions, one growing old as the other grows young, and vice
versa. The cyclical relation between them runs through four cardi-
nal points: a son-mother phase, a husband-wife phase, a father-
daughter phase, and a fourth phase of what Blake calls spectre
and emanation, terms corresponding roughly to Shelley's alastor
and epipsyche. None of these phases is quite true: the mother is on-
ly a nurse, the wife merely ''bound down" for the male's delight, the
daughter a changeling, and the emanation does not "emanate,
but remains elusive. The male figure represents humanity, and
therefore includes women— the "female will" in Blake becomes
associated with women only when women dramatize or mimic the
above relation in human life, as they do in the Courtly Love con-
vention. The female figure represents the natural environment
which man partially but never wholly subdues. The controlling
symbolism of the poem, as the four phases suggest, is lunar.
To the extent that the encyclopaedic form concerns itself with
the cycle of human life, an ambivalent female archetype appears
in it, sometimes benevolent, sometimes sinister, but usually presid-
ing over and confirming the cyclical movement. One pole of her is
represented by an Isis figure, a Penelope or Solveig who is the fixed
point on which the action ends. The goddess who frequently be-
gins and ends the cyclical action is closely related. This figure is
Athene in the Odyssey and Venus in the Aeneid; in Elizabethan
literature, for political reasons, usually some variant of Diana, like
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THEORY OF GENRES
the Faerie Queen in Spenser. The alma Venus who suffuses Lu-
cretius' great vision of life balanced in the order of nature is an-
other version. Beatrice in Dante presides over not a cycle but a
sacramental spiral leading up to deity, as does, in a far less concrete
way, the Ewig-W eibliche of Faust At the opposite pole is a figure-—
Calypso or Circe in Homer, Dido in Virgil, Cleopatra in Shake-
speare, Duessa in Spenser, sometimes a ''terrible mother” but often
sympathetically treated— who represents the opposite direction from
the heroic quest. Eve in Milton, who spirals man downward into
the Fall, is the contrasting figure to Beatrice.
In the ironic age there are naturally a good many visions of a
cycle of experience, often presided over by a female figure with
lunar and femme fatale affiliations. Yeats's Vision, which Yeats was
quite right in associating with The Mental Traveller, is based on
this symbolism, and more recently Mr. Robert Graves' The White
Goddess has expounded it with even greater learning and ingenuity.
In Eliot's Waste Land the figure in the background is less "the
lady of situations” than the androgynous Teiresias, and although
there is a fire sermon and a thunder sermon, both with apocalyptic
overtones, the natural cycle of water, the Thames flowing into the
sea and returning through death by water in the spring rains, is
the containing form of the poem. In Joyce's Ulysses a female figure
at once maternal, marital, and meretricious, a Penelope who em-
braces all her suitors, merges in her sleep with the drowsy spinning
earth, constantly affirming but never forming, and taking the whole
book with her.
But it is Finnegans Wake which is the chief ironic epic of our
time. Here again the containing structure is cyclical, as the end
of the book swings us around to the beginning again. Finnegan
never really wakes up, because HCE fails to establish any continuity
between his dreaming and waking worlds. The central figure is
ALP, but we notice that ALP, although she has very little of the
Beatrice or Virgin Mary about her, has even less of the femme
fatale. She is a harried but endlessly patient and solicitous wife
and mother: she runs through her natural cycle and achieves no
quest herself, but she is clearly the kind of being who makes a
quest possible. Who then is the hero who achieves the permanent
quest in Finnegans Wakel No character in the book itself seems a
likely candidate; yet "one feels that this book gives us something
more than the merely irresponsible irony of a turning cycle. Eventu-
3^3
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
ally it dawns on us that it is the reader who achieves the quest, the
reader who, to the extent that he masters the book of Doublends
Jined, is able to look down on its rotation, and see its form as some-
thing more than rotation.
In encyclopaedic forms, such as the epic and its congeners, we
see how the conventional themes, around which lyrics cluster, re-
appear as episodes of a longer story. Thus the panegyric reappears
in the klea andron or heroic contests, the poem of community ac-
tion in the convention of the games, the elegy in heroic death,
and so on. The reverse development occurs when a lyric on a con-
ventional theme achieves a concentration that expands it into a
miniature epic: if not the historical ''little epic” or epyllion, some-
thing very like it generically. Thus Lycidas is a miniature scriptural
epic extending over the whole range covered by Paradise Lost, the
death of man and his redemption by Christ. Spenser's Epithalamion
also probably contains in miniature as much symbolic range as
the unwritten conclusion to his epic would have had. In modern
times the miniature epic becomes a very common form: the later
poems of Eliot, of Edith Sitwell, and many cantos of Pound belong
to it.
Often too, in illustration of our general principle, a miniature
epic actually forms part of a bigger one. The prophecy of Michael
in Paradise Lost presents the whole Bible as a miniature contrast-
epic, with one pole at the apocalypse and the other at the flood.
The Bible itself contains the Book of Job, which is a kind of
microcosm of its total theme, and is cited by Milton as the model
for the “brief” epic.
Similarly, oratorical prose develops into the more continuous
forms of prose fiction, and similarly too the growing points of prose,
so to speak, which we called the commandment, parable, aphorism,
and oracle, reappear as the kernels of scriptural forms. In many
types of prose romance verse or characteristics of verse are promi-
nent: the old Irish epics, euphuism in Elizabethan romance, the
rhyming prose of the Arabian Nights, the use of poems for culti-
vated dialogue in the Japanese Tale of Genji, are random examples
showing how universal the tendency is. But as epos grows into epic,
it conventionalizes and unifies its metre, while prose goes its own
way in separate forms. In the low mimetic period the gap between
the subjective mythological epic and the objective historical one
THEORY OF GENRES
is increased by the fact that the former seems to belong by its
decorum to verse and the latter to prose. In prose satire, however,
we notice a strong tendency on the part of prose to reabsorb verse.
We have mentioned the frequency of the verse interlude in the
anatomy tradition, and in the melos of Rabelais, Sterne and Joyce
the tendency is carried much farther. In scriptural forms, we have
seen, the gap between prose and verse is very narrow, and some-
times hardly exists at all.
We come back to where we started this section, then, to the
Bible, the only form which unites the architectonics of Dante
with the disintegration of Rabelais. From one point of view, the
Bible presents an epic structure of unsurpassed range, consistency
and completeness; from another, it presents a seamy side of bits
and pieces which makes the Tale of a Tuh, Tristram Shandy, and
Sartor Resartus look as homogeneous as a cloudless sky. Some
mystery is here which literary criticism might find it instructive
to look into.
When we do look into it, we find that the sense of unified con-
tinuity is what the Bible has as a work of fiction, as a definitive
myth extending over time and space, over invisible and visible
orders of reality, and with a parabolic dramatic stracture of which
the five acts are creation, fall, exile, redemption, and restoration.
The more we study this myth, the more its descriptive or sigmatic
aspect seems to fall into the background. For most readers, myth,
legend, historical reminiscence, and actual history are inseparable
in the Bible; and even what is historical fact is not there because
it is ''true'^ but because it is mythically significant. The begats in
Chronicles may be authentic history; the Book of Job is clearly
an imaginative drama, but the Book of Job is more important, and
closer to Christ's practice of revelation through parable. The
priority of myth to fact is religious as well as literary; in both con-
texts the significance of the flood story is in its imaginative status as
an archetype, a status which no layer of mud on top of Sumeria will
ever account for. When we apply this principle to the gospels,
with all the variations in their narratives, the descriptive aspect of
them too dissolves. The basis of their form is something other than
biography, just as the basis of the Exodus story is something other
than history.
At this point the analytic view of the Bible begins to come into
focus as the thematic aspect of it. In proportion as the continuous
3^5
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
fictional myth begins to look illusory, as the text breaks down into
smaller and smaller fragments, it takes on the appearance of a se-
quence of epiphanies, a discontinuous but rightly ordered series of
significant moments of apprehension or vision. The Bible may thus
be examined from an* aesthetic or Aristotelian point of view as a
single form, as a story in which pity and terror, which in this con-
text are the knowledge of good and evil, are raised and cast out. Or
it may be examined from a Longinian point of view as a series of
ecstatic moments or points of expanding apprehension— this ap-
proach is in fact the assumption on which every selection of a text
for a sermon is based. Here we have a critical principle which we
can take back to literature and apply to anything we like, a prin-
ciple in which the “holism,'' as it has been called, of Coleridge and
the discontinuous theories of Poe, Hulme, and Pound are recon-
ciled, Yet the Bible is ^^more" than a work of literature, so perhaps
the principle has a wider range of extension even than literature.
In any case we have gone as far as we can within literature, and
the remainder of this book will be concerned with the literary
aspect of verbal structures generally called non-Iiterary.
THE RHETORIC OF NON-LITERARY PROSE
Prose is, unlike verse, used also for non-literary purposes: it ex-
tends not only to the literary boundaries of melos and opsis, but
to the outer worlds of praxis and theoria, social action and indi-
vidual thought themselves. Renaissance critics used to argue about
what the greatest form for poetry was, and whether it was epic or
tragedy. TTiere is probably no answer to such a question, but one
can learn a good deal about literary form by discussing it. Now if
we ask the question: What is the greatest possible prose form?
there is probably no answer to that question either, but the moment
we ask it, a great number of works, the Bible, the dialogues of
Plato, the meditations of Pascal— in fact, all ^%reat books*' usually
placed outside literature— leap into a new literary significance. It is
thus necessary for us at this point to consider what literary elements
are involved in the verbal structures in which the literary or hypo-
thetical intention is not the primary one,
We are still thinking gf literature as facing the world of social
action on one side, and of individual thought on the other, so that
the rhetoric of non-literary prose would tend to emphasize emotion
326
THEORY OF GENRES
and the appeal to action through the ear in the former area, and
intellect and the appeal to contemplation based predominantly on
visual metaphors in the latter. Let us begin with that extensive
suburb of prose that is concerned with the technique of social or
oratorical persuasion.
The most concentrated examples of this are to be found in the
pamphlet or speech that catches the rhythm of history, that seizes
on a crucial event or phase of action, interprets it, articulates the
emotions concerned with it, or in some means employs a verbal
structure to insulate and conduct the cunent of history. Areopa-
giticdj Johnson's letter to Chesterfield, some sermons in the pe-
riod between Latimer and the Commonwealth, some of Burke's
speeches, Lincoln's Gettysburg address, Vanzetti's death speech,
Churchill's 1940 speeches, are a few examples that come readily
to mind. None of these were designed with a primarily literary
intention, and would have failed of their original purpose if they
had been, but they are literary now, and data for the critic. Nearly
all of them are marked by the emphatic patterns of repetition and
anaphora characteristic of rhetorical prose.
TTie measured cadences of these historical oracles represent a
kind of strategic withdrawal from action: they marshal and review
the ranks of familiar but deeply-held ideas. The rhetoric of persua-
sion to action itself, which is the next stage of prose as we proceed
from literature outwards into social life, is considerably stepped up
in its rhythm. Here the repetitions are hypnotic and incantatory,
aimed at breaking down customary associations of ideas and habitual
responses, and at excluding any alternative line of action. Such a
rhetoric may be heard in its purest form in the speech rhythms of a
boy talking to a dog, with the object of persuading him to sit up
or shake hands or otherwise move out of the normal line of canine
endeavor. When addressed to a human audience, such rhetoric
must follow the dialectic of rhetoric: it must have either a rallying
point or a point of attack, or both. The rhetoric of attack or in-
vective is exemplified in the pulpit's crusade against sin and in the
prosecutor's summing-up in the courtroom. The latter has produced
the by-form of the philippic, the indictment of a social enemy. The
rhetoric of eulogy, the so-called epideictic rhetoric of the Classical
world, is in our day most clearly seen in advertising and publicity,
although it has a more genuinely literary form in the type of “purple
3^7
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
passage"' prose^ usually with a descriptive content, that attempts
to communicate some kind of wordless emotion.
As these examples show, we are moving rapidly away from litera-
ture towards the direct verbal expression of kinetic emotion. The
further we go in this direction, the more likely the author is to be,
or to pretend to be, emotionally involved with his subject, so that
what he exhorts us to embrace or avoid is in part a projection from
his own emotional life. As this increases, a certain automatism
comes into the writing: the verbal expression of infantile-centered
hatreds, fears, loves, and objects of adoration. When Swinburne
speaks of '‘the yelling Yahoos whom the scandalous and senseless
license of our own day allows to run and roar about the country
unmuzzled and unwhipped," we may not know what he is referring
to, but a glance at the prose structure, with its automatic allitera-
tion and doubling of adjectives, makes it clear that whatever it is
we hardly need to take it seriously. Such writing is a familiar and
easily recognized phenomenon: it is tantrum prose, the prose of so
much Victorian criticism, of several acres of Carlyle and Ruskin,
of clerical denunciations of heresies or secular amusements, of
totalitarian propaganda, and in fact of nearly all rhetoric in which
we feel that the author's pen is running away from him, setting up
a mechanical for an imaginative impetus. The metaphor of "in-
toxication" is often employed for the breakdown of rhetorical
control.
The more incoherent this kind of rhetoric becomes, the more
clearly it shows itself to be an attempt to express emotion apart
from or without intellect. At this point we enter the area of emo-
tional jargon, which consists largely in an obsessive repetition of
verbal formulas. Not far removed is the kind of vulgar inarticulate-
ness that uses one word, generally unprintable, for the whole rhetori-
cal ornament of the sentence, including adjectives, adverbs, epi-
thets, and punctuation. Finally, words disappear altogether, and we
are back to a primitive language of screams and gestures and sighs.
The whole sequence can of course be imitated within literature,
Shakespeare giving us everything from Henry V's address before the
walls of Harfleur to Othello's "goats and monkeys" speech. The
imitation of emotional rhetoric in literary prose is a feature making
for melos in the latter. Similarly in literature we occasionally run
across a writer who uses such rhetorical material without being able
to absorb or assimilate it: the result is pathological, a kind of liter-
328
THEORY OF GENRES
ary diabetes, and may be studied in the novels of Amanda Ros.
The expression of conceptual thought in prose exhibits a parallel
sequence of phenomena, moving in the opposite direction. Philos-
ophy is assertive or propositional writing, and we notice in the his-
tory of philosophy a persistent attempt to isolate the rhythm of the
proposition. Philosophy begins in proverbs and axioms," and at vari-
ous times it has produced the dialectic dialogue of Plato and the
Upanishads, the closely related question-objection-answer scheme of
St. Thomas, the quasi-mathematical arrangements of ideas in Spi-
noza, the aphorisms of Bacon (who remarks that aphorisms are a
sign of vitality in philosophy), and, in our day, the numbered prop-
ositions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. All of these are clearly at
least in part endeavors to purify verbal communication of the emo-
tional content of rhetoric; all of them, however, impress the literary
critic as being themselves rhetorical devices.
The implication is that there is a conceptual rhetoric aimed, like
persuasive rhetoric, at separating emotion and intellect, but at-
tempting to throw away the emotional half. It seeks the book and
the individual reader as its fellow seeks the audience; its goal is
understanding as the goal of persuasion is action or emotional re-
sponse. A good deal of the strategy of teaching is rhetorical strategy,
choosing words and images with great care in order to evoke the
response: '1 never thought of it that way before," or *'Now that you
put it that way, I can see it." What distinguishes, not simply the
epigram, but profundity itself from platitude is very frequently
rhetorical wit. In fact it may be doubted whether we ever really call
an idea profound unless we are pleased with the wit of its expres-
sion. Teaching, like persuasion, employs a dissociative rhetoric
aimed at breaking down habitual response: the maddening prolixity
of Oriental sutras results from this, and there are passages in the
New Testament almost as dissociative as Gertrude Stein:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon,
and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life
was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew
unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was
manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard de-
clare we unto you . . .
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
Without trying to suggest that only good writers can be good
philosophers, we may still observe that much of the difficulty in a
philosophical style is rhetorical in origin, resulting from a feeling
that it is necessary to detach and isolate the intellect from the emo-
tions. A sentence from James Mill's Essay on Government will il-
lustrate what I mean:
One caution, first of all, we should take along with us, and it
is this: that all those persons who hold the powers of govern-
ment without having an identity of interests with the community,
and all those persons who share in the profits which are made by
the abuse of those powers, and all those persons whom the ex-
ample and representations of the two first classes influence, will
be sure to represent the community, or a part having an identity
of interest with the community, as incapable in the highest de-
gree of acting according to their own interest; it being clear that
they who have not an identity of interest with the community
ought to hold the power of government no longer, if those who
have that identity of interest could be expected to act in any
tolerable conformity with their interest.
This is finally discovered to mean, after one has worked it all out
like a crossword puzzle, that those who have a stake in one form
of government are likely to resist the introduction of another. The
critic, searching for the reasons why, if James Mill meant that, he
could not have said it, eventually realizes that the style is motivated
by a perverse, bristly intellectual honesty. He will not condescend
to employ any of the pretty arts of persuasion, sugar-coated illustra-
tions or emotionally-loaded terms; he will appeal only to the cold
logic of reason itself— reinforced, to be sure, by a peculiarly Vic-
torian sense that the more difficult the style, the tougher the moral
and intellectual fibre one develops in wrestling with it.
We note that the basis of James Mill’s rhetoric is the imitation
of legal style, with its careful qualifying inclusiveness. The long
containing sentences of the later Henry James already mentioned
illustrate the literary use of similar devices. Passing over some inter-
mediate stages, we eventually arrive, in this pursuit of non-emo-
tional rhetoric, at conceptual jargon, otherwise known as gobble-
dygook or officialese. This is a naive intensification of Mill's desire
to speak with the voice, not of personality, but of Reason itself.
The jargon of government reports, inter-office memoranda, and
THEORY OF GENRES
military instructions is motivated by a wish to be as impersonal as
possible, to represent verbally the Institution or some anonymous
cybernetic deity functioning in a state of ''normalcy/' What it ac-
tually utters, of course, is the voice of the lonely crowd, the anxiety
of the outward-directed conformist. Such jargon may be called,
bonowing a term from medicine, benign jargon: it is unmistakably
a disease of language, but not— yet~a cancerous disease like a dema-
gogue's oratory. It is found in most aspects of journalism and is the
dress uniform of a large amount of professional writing, including
that of humanists. That it could become malignant is indicated in
1984, where a further stage of it is caricatured as "Newspeak," a
pseudo-logical simplification of language which has, like emotional
jargon, complete automatism as its goal. We are not surprised to
find that the further we depart from literature, or the use of lan-
guage to express the completely integrated state of emotional con-
sciousness we call imagination, the nearer we come to the use of
language as the expression of reflex. Whether we go in the emo-
tional or in the intellectual direction, we arrive at much the same
point, a point antipodal to literature in which language is a run^
ning commentary on the unconscious, like a squirrel's chatter.
If there is such a thing as conceptual rhetoric, which is likely to
increase in proportion as the discursive writer tries to avoid it, it
seems as though the direct union of grammar and logic, which we
suggested at the beginning of this essay might be the characteristic
of the non-literary verbal structure, does not, in the long run, exist.
Anything which makes a functional use of words will always be
involved in all the technical problems of words, including rhetorical
problems. The only road from grammar to logic, then, runs through
the intermediate territory of rhetoric.
We notice in the first place that attempts to reduce grammar to
logic, or logic to grammar, have not had the success they should
have had if there were a large and important non-rhetorical com-
mon factor on which non-literary writing could be built. For a long
time the prestige of the discursive reason fostered the notion that
logic was the formal cause of language, that universal grammars on
logical principles were possible, and that the entire resources of
linguistic expression could be categorized. We are now more ac-
customed to think pf reasoning as one of many things that man
does with words, a specialized function of language. There seems
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
to be no evidence whatever that man learned to speak primarily
because he wanted to speak logically.
The attempts to reduce logic to grammar are more recent, but
not much more successful. Logic grows out of grammar, the un-
conscious or potential logic inherent in language, and we often
find that the containing forms of conceptual thought are of gram-
matical origin, the stock example being the subject and predicate
of Aristotelian logic. The fluid primitive linguistic conceptions often
mentioned by anthropologists, such as the Polynesian mana or the
Iroquois orenda, are participial or gerundive conceptions: they
belong in a world where energy and matter have not been clearly
separated, either in thought or into the verbs and nouns of our own
less flexible language-structure. As energy and matter are not clearly
separated in nuclear physics either, we might do worse than to re-
turn to such “primitive"' words ourselves. The words atom and
light, for example, being nouns, may be too material and static to
be adequate symbols for what they now mean, and when they pass
from the equations of a physicist into the linguistic apparatus of
contemporary social consciousness, the grammatical difficulties in
the translation show up clearly.
But there is still the scholar's mate in the argument for reducing
logic to grammar: the fallacy of thinking that we have explained
the nature of something by accounting for its origin in something
else. Logic may have grown out of grammar, but to grow out of
something is in part to outgrow it. For grammar may also be a
hampering force in the development of logic, and a major source
of logical confusions and pseudo-problems. These confusions ex-
tend much further than even the enormous brood of fallacies
spawned by paronomasia, which is, like so many of our phenomena,
a structural principle in literature and an obstacle in discursive writ-
ing. For instance, many long arguments may be annihilated by a
grammatical change from definite articles and statements of identity
to indefinite articles and active verbs. To say “reason is a function
of the mind" is unlikely to lead to dispute; to say “reason is the
function of the mind" involves one in a pointless struggle for the
exclusive possession of an essence. To say “art communicates" is
similarly to be content with an obvious plurality of functions: to
say “art is communication" forces us into circular wrangling around
a metaphor taken as an assertion. It is no wonder, then, that many
logicians tend to think of grammar as something of a logical disease,
33 ^
THEORY OF GENRES
some of them even maintaining that mathematics is the real source
of coherence in logic. I have no opinion on this, except to repeat
that anything which makes a functional use of words will always
be involved in all the problems of words.
Grammar and logic both seem to develop through internal con-
flict. The humanist tradition has always, and rightly, stressed the
importance of linguistic conflict in training the mind; if we do not
know another language, we have missed the best and simplest op-
portunity of getting our ideas disentangled from the swaddling
clothes of their native syntax. Similarly logic cannot develop prop-
erly without dialectic, the principle of opposition in thought. Now
when people speaking different languages come into contact, an
ideogrammatic structure is built up out of the efforts at communi-
cation. The figure 5 is an ideogram,- because it means the same num-
ber to people who call it five, cinq, cinque, fiinf, and a dozen other
things. Similarly, the purely linguistic associations of English ‘‘time''
and French “temps" are different, but it is quite practicable to
translate Proust or Bergson on time into English without serious
risk of misunderstanding the meaning. When two languages are in
different cultural orbits, like English and Zulu, the ideogrammatic
structure is more difficult to build up, but it always seems to be
more or less possible. There are French equivalents for all English
words and ideas, but obviously one cannot walk into a Polynesian
or Iroquois society and ask: “What are your words for God, the
soul, reality, knowledge?" They may have no such words or con-
cepts, nor can we give them our equivalents for mana and orenda.
Yet it seems clear that we can eventually, with patient and sym-
pathetic study, find out what is going on in a Polynesian or Iroquois
mind. The problems of communication between two people speak-
ing the same language may in some respects be even greater, be-
cause more difficult to become aware of, but even they can be ulti-
mately surmounted. It is out of such ideogrammatic inner struc-
tures, whether produced linguistically between two languages, or
psychologically between two people speaking the same language,
that the capacity to assimilate language to rational thought devel-
ops.
This ideogrammatic middle ground between two languages, or
between two personal structures of meaning in the same language,
must itself be a symbolic structure, not simply a bilingual dictionary.
Hence the ideogram is neither purely grammatical nor purely logi-
333
FOURTH ESSAY; RHETORICAL CRITICISM
cal: it is both at once, and rhetorical as well, for, like rhetoric, it
brings an audience into being, and reinforces the language of con-
sciousness with that of association. The ideogram, in short, is a
metaphor, the identification of two things of which each retains its
own form, the realization that what you mean by X in this context
is what I mean by Y. Such an ideogram may differ from the purely
hypothetical metaphor of the poem, but the mental leap of met-
aphor away from the simple ''this means that'^ sign is present in it.
Whether the reader agrees with all this or not, he may at any
rate be willing to admit the possibility of links between grammar
and rhetoric, and between rhetoric and logic, that have a neglected
but crucial importance. Let us take the link of grammar and rhet-
oric first.
We remember that a good deal of verbal creation begins in asso-
ciative babble, in which sound and sense are equally involved. The
result of this is poetic ambiguity, the fact that, as remarked earlier,
the poet does not define his words but establishes their powers by
placing them in a great variety of contexts. Hence the importance
of poetic etymology, or the tendency to associate words similar in
sound or sense. For many centuries this tendency passed itself off
as genuine etymology, and the student was taught to think in terms
of verbal association. He learned to think of snow as coming ety-
mologically as well as physically from clouds {nix a nuhes), and of
dark groves as derived from sunlight (the derivation by opposites
which produced the famous lucus a non lucendo). When real
etymology developed, this associative process was discarded as mum-
bo-jumbo, which it is from one point of view, but it remains a fac-
tor of great importance in criticism. Here again we meet the prin-
ciple that an analogy between A and B (in this case two words)
may still be important even if the view that A is the source of B
is dropped. Whether or not one is etymologically justified in as-
sociating Prometheus with forethought or Odysseus with wrath,
the poets have accepted such associations and they are data for the
critic. Whether or not "new"' critics make mistakes or anachronisms
in explicating the texture of earlier poetry, the principle involved
is defensible historically as well as psychologically.
We soon become aware, moreover, that verbal association is still
a factor of importance even in rational thought. One of the most
effective methods of conveying meaning in translation, for instance,
is to leave a key word untranslated, so that the reader has to pick
334
THEORY OF GENRES
up its contextual associations in the original language from his own.
Again, in trying to understand the thought of a philosopher, one
often starts by considering a single word, say nature in Aristotle,
substance in Spinoza, or time in Bergson, in the total range of its
connotations. One often feels that a full understanding of such a
word would be a key to the understanding of the whole system. If
so, it would be a metaphorical key, as it would be a set of identifi-
cations made by the thinker with the word. The attempt to regard
such connotative terms as invariably fallacious does not get us very
far. Students are often graduated from college armed only with
complaints that people will not define their terms, reason clearly,
or argue about freedom or order without emotional attachments to
those words. It is perhaps more useful to shift our attention from
what verbal communication is not to what it is, and what is com-
municated is usually some ambiguous and emotionally charged
complex. In any case the notion that it is possible to reduce lan-
guage to sign-language, to make one word invariably mean one
thing, is an illusion. After One has removed associative ambiguity
from verbs and nouns, one has then the problem of adjectives and
adverbs, which are universals by their very nature, and finally prepo-
sitions and conjunctions, which, being pure connectives, will always
display a disconcerting semantic versatility. A glance at the N.E.D.
entries for '*to,'' ''for,'' and "in" should discourage the brashest of
verbal atomizers.
The link between rhetoric and logic is "doodle" or associative
diagram, the expression of the conceptual by the spatial. A great
number of prepositions are spatial metaphors, most of them de-
rived from the orientation of the human body. Every use of "up,"
"down," "besides," "on the other hand," "under” implies a sub-
conscious diagram in the argument, whatever it is. If a writer says
"But on the other hand there is a further consideration to be
brought forward in support of the opposing argument," he may be
writing normal (if wordy) English, but he is also doing precisely
what an armchair strategist does when he scrawls plans of battle
on a tablecloth. Very often a '‘structure" or "system" of thought
can be reduced to a diagrammatic pattern— in fact both words are
to some extent synonyms of diagram. A philosopher is of great as-
sistance to his reader when he realizes the presence of such a dia-
gram and extracts it, as Plato does in his discussion of the divided
335
FOURTH ESSAY: RHETORICAL CRITICISM
line. We cannot go far in any argument without realizing that there
is some kind of graphic formula involved. All division and categori-
zation, the use of chapters, the topotropism (if I have constructed
this correctly) signalled by “let us now turn to’" or “reverting to
the point made earlier,"" the sense of what “fits"" the argument, the
feeling that one point is “central"" and another peripheral, has some
kind of geometrical basis.
It used to be said that, as all abstract words were originally con-
crete metaphors, something of the latter will always adhere to the
word through all its semantic history. This view is discredited now,
but it still has much truth in it: I question whether it is really pos-
sible to make B depend on A without in some measure hanging it
on, or involve B with A without in some measure wrapping them
up. The only fallacy in it, I think, is the assumption that the at-
tached metaphor must necessarily be the one implied in the ety-
mology of the word. Of course a writer may give a word a meaning
which has no recognizable connection with its origin. But it looks
as though abstract words and ideas were on loan, so to speak, from
a latent concrete formulation which is to be found, not in the his-
tory of the word used, but in the structure of the argument into
which the word is fitted.
As soon as one starts to think of the role of association and dia-
gram in argument, one begins to realize how extraordinarily per-
vasive they are. I once heard a preacher advocate religion on the
ground that science was too cold and dry to serve as a guide to life,
while the heat of revolutionary zeal still left one thirsting for some-
thing more. The figures seemed commonplace, yet it was clear that
the ancient diagram of the four principles of substance, hot, cold,
moist, and dry, was the graphic formula of his argument, and that
religion meant something wet to him, a fertilizing moisture that
would warm the scientists and cool the radicals. The same prin-
ciple of a graphic formula is found in such assumptions as: that the
intellect is cool and sober and the emotions warm and drunk; that
the practical sense walks and the imaginative one leaps; that facts
are solid (“stubborn""), hypotheses liquid (“covering"" facts), and
theories gaseous; that whatever is “inside"" the mind is dimly lit
and whatever is “outside"" it clear, and so on. Also in value-assump-
tions: that the concrete is better than the abstract, the active better
than the passive, the dynamic better than the static, the unified
better than the multiple, the simple better than the complex. Re-
THEORY OF GENRES
ligious people think of heaven as "‘up"'; psychologists think of the
subconscious as ''underneath'' the consciousness, both words being
obviously spatial metaphors.
We could go on for a long time, but by now it is surely clear
that it is wiser simply to become aware of metaphor than to try to
eradicate it. Attempts to analyze metaphor solely to debunk an
argument or suggest that it is "nothing but" a metaphor are not to
be encouraged. What is to be encouraged is the analysis itself, in
which there is, I think, an activity of considerable and increasing
importance for literary critics, as the conclusion of this book will
suggest.
The discursive reason has traditionally been given the place of
honor in Western culture. In religion, no poetry outside Scripture
is given the authority of the theologian's propositions; in philos-
ophy, the reason is the high priest of reality (unless there are spe-
cial features in the philosophy giving a peculiar importance to the
arts, as there are in Schelling's); in science the same hierarchical
diagram is even clearer. Hence the arts have been traditionally re-
garded as forms of "accommodation," their function being to es-
tablish a link between reason and whatever is put "below" it on the
assumed diagram, such as the emotions or the senses. It is thus no
surprise to ‘find "accommodation" in verbal structures aimed at
rousing emotion or at some form of kinetic persuasion. Such ac-
commodation has been recognized for centuries, as it is consistent
with the traditional subordinating of rhetoric to dialectic. The no-
tion of a conceptual rhetoric raises new problems, as it suggests that
nothing built out of words can transcend the nature and conditions
of words, and that the nature and conditions of ratio, so far as ra-
tio is verbal, are contained by oratio.
337
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
Tentative Conclusion
The present book has dealt with a variety of critical techniques
and approaches, most of them already used in contemporary schol-
arship. We have tried to show where the archetypal or mythical
critic, the aesthetic form critic, the historical critic, the medieval
four-level critic, the text-and-texture critic, belong in a comprehen-
sive view of criticism. Whether the comprehensive view is right or
not, I hope some sense has been communicated of what folly it
would be to try to exclude any of these groups from criticism. As
was said at the beginning, the present book is not designed to sug-
gest a new program for critics, but a new perspective on their exist-
ing programs, which in themselves are valid enough. The book at-
tacks no methods of criticism, once that subject has been defined:
what it attacks are the barriers between the methods. These bar-
riers tend to make a critic confine himself to a single method of
criticism, which is unnecessary, and they tend to make him estab-
lish his primary contacts, not with other critics, but with subjects
outside criticism. Hence the number of essays, not large but too
large, in mythical criticism that read like bad comparative religion,
in rhetorical criticism that read like bad semantics, in aesthetic criti-
cism that read like bad metaphysics, and so on.
In this process of breaking down barriers I think archetypal criti-
cism has a central role, and I have given it a prominent place. One
element in our cultural tradition which is usually regarded as fan-
tastic nonsense is the allegorical explanations of myths which bulk
so large in medieval and Renaissance criticism and continue sporadi-
cally (e.g., Ruskm's Queen of the Air) to our own time. The al-
legorization of myth is hampered by the assumption that the ex-
planation *‘is” what the myth “means.” A myth being a centripetal
structure of meaning, it can be made to mean an indefinite number
of things, and it is more fruitful to study what in fact myths have
been made to mean.
The term myth may have, and obviously does have, different
meanings in different subjects. These meanings are doubtless rec-
oncilable in the long run, but the task of reconciling them lies in
the future. In literary criticism myth means ultimately mythos^ a
structural organizing principle of literary form. Commentary, we
remember, is allegorization, and any great work of literature may
34 ^
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
carry an infinite amount of commentary. This fact often depresses
the critic and makes him feel that everything to be said about Ham-
let, for instance, must already have been said many times. To what
has occurred to the learned and astute minds of A and B in reading
Hamlet is added what occurs to the learned and astute minds of
C, D, E, and so on, until out of sheer self-preservation most of it
is left unread, or (much the same thing culturally) is assigned to
specialists. Commentary which has no sense of the archetypal shape
of literature as a whole, then, continues the tradition of allegorized
myth, and inherits its characteristics of brilliance, ingenuity, and
futility.
The only cure for this situation is the supplementing of allegori-
cal with archetypal criticism. Things become more hopeful as soon
as there is a feeling, however dim, that criticism has an end in the
structure of literature as a total form, as well as a beginning in the
text studied. It is not sufficient to use the text as a check on com-
mentary, like a string tied to a kite, for one may develop a primary
body of commentary around the obvious meaning, then a secondary
body about the unconscious meaning, then a third body around the
conventions and external relations of the poem, and so on indefi-
nitely. This practice is not confined to modern critics, for the in-
terpretation of Virgirs Fourth Eclogue as Messianic also assumed
that Virgil was ''unconsciously'^ prophesying the Messiah. But the
poet unconsciously meant the whole corpus of his possible com-
mentary, and it is simpler merely to say that Virgil and Isaiah use
the same type of imagery dealing with the myth of the hero's birth,
and that because of this similarity the Nativity Ode, for instance,
is able to use both. This procedure helps to distribute the commen-
tary, and prevents each poem from becoming a separate center of
isolated scholarship.
The theory of criticism embraces the "humanities," in their edu-
cational aspect, according to our principle that it is criticism and
not literature which is directly taught and learned. Hence a sense
of bewilderment about the theory of criticism is readily projected
as a concern over the "fate" or "plight" of the humanities. The
breaking down of barriers within criticism would therefore have
the long-run effect of making critics more aware of the external
relations of criticism as a whole with other disciplines. This last
subject is one on which I make a few final comments only be-
cause it seems to me that it would be an excess of prudence, in fact
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
hardly honest, to shnnh altogether from the larger issues of the
questions here discussed.
The production of art is usually described in the “creative” met-
aphors of organic life. There is a curious tendency in human life
to imitate some of the aspects of “lower” forms of existence, like
the rituals which imitate the subtle synchronizations with the
rhythms of the turning year that vegetable life makes. It is not m
itself unreasonable that human culture would unconsciously assume
the rhythms of an organism. Artists tend to imitate their predeces-
sors in a slightly more sophisticated way, thus producing a tradition
of cultural aging which goes on until some large change interrupts
the process and starts it over again. Hence the containing form of
historical criticism may well be some quasi-organic rhythm of
cultural aging, such as is postulated in one form or another by most
of the philosophical historians of our time, most explicitly by
Spengler. The conception of our own time as a “late” phase of a
“Western” culture of which the Middle Ages was the youth, and
as a phase resembling the Roman phase of an earlier Classical cul-
ture, is in practice taken for granted by everyone today, and seems
to be one of the inevitable categories of the contemporary outlook.
The progression of modes traced in the first essay seems to have
some analogy to this view of cultural history.
Any such view, if adopted, could be decorated metaphysically
to suit the tenant: but there is no reason why it should be “fatalis-
tic,” unless it is fatalism to say that one gets older every year, nor
why it should include any theory of inevitable cycles in history or
a pre-ordained future. Certainly it should not be perverted into a
basis for rhetorical value-judgements. We get these, for instance, in
the sentimental view of medieval culture which sees it as a gigantic
synthesis followed by a progressive disintegration which has sub-
divided and specialized until it has finally landed us all in the Pretty
Pass which we are m today. A movement which will restore some-
thing of the unity of medieval culture to the modern world, or
some other qualities of it, has been hailed in one form or other m
nearly every generation since the middle of the eighteenth century.
Subsidiary forms of the same view are present in the people who
cannot listen with pleasure to any music later than Mozart, or
whatever terminal they choose; in the Marxists who speak of the
decadence of capitalist culture; in the alarmists who speak of a re-
343
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
turn to a new Dark Ages, and so on. All these have a more or less
muddled version of some quasi-organic theory of history as their
basis.
It is a commonplace of criticism that art does not evolve or im-
prove: it produces the classic or model. One can still buy books nar-
rating the ''development'' of painting from the Stone Age to Pi-
casso, but they show no development, only a series of mutations
in skill, Picasso being on much the same level as his Magdalenian
ancestors. Every once in a while we experience in the arts a feeling
of definitive revelation. This, we may feel after a Palestrina motet
or a Mozart divertimento, is the voice of music itself: this is the
kind of thing that music was invented to say. Here is a simplicity
which makes us realize that the simple is the opposite of the com-
monplace, a feeling that the boundaries of possible expression in
the art have been reached for all time. This feeling belongs to di-
rect experience, not to criticism, but it suggests the critical prin-
ciple that the profoundest experiences possible to obtain in the arts
are available in the art already produced.
What does improve in the arts is the comprehension of them,
and the refining of society which results from it. It is the consumer,
not the producer, who benefits by culture, the consumer who be-
comes humanized and liberally educated. There is no reason why
a great poet should be a wise and good man, or even a tolerable
human being, but there is every reason why his reader should be
improved in his humanity as a result of reading him. Hence while
the production of culture may be, like ritual, a half-involuntary
imitation of organic rhythms or processes, the response to culture is,
like myth, a revolutionary act of consciousness. The contemporary
development of the technical ability to study the arts, represented
by reproductions of painting, the recording of music, and modem
libraries, forms part of a cultural revolution which makes the hu-
manities quite as pregnant with new developments as the sciences.
For the revolution is not simply in technology, but in spiritual pro-
ductive power. The humanistic tradition itself arose, in its modem
form, with the invention of the printing press, the immediate effect
of which was not to stimulate new culture so much as to codify the
heritage of the past.
Nearly every work of art in the past had a social function in its
own time, a function which was often not primarily an aesthetic
function at all. The whole conception of "works of art" as a clas-
344
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
sification for all pictures, statues, poems, and musical compositions
is a relatively modern one. We can see an aesthetic impulse at work
in Peruvian textiles, palaeolithic drawings, Scythian horse orna-
ments, or Kwakiutl masks, but in doing so we make a sophisticated
abstraction which may well have been outside the mental habits
of the people who produced them. Thus the question of whether
a thing “is'' a work of art or not is one which cannot be settled by
appealing to something in the nature of the thing itself. It is con-
vention, social acceptance, and the work of criticism in the broadest
sense that determines where it belongs. It may have been originally
made for use rather than pleasure, and so fall outside the general
Aristotelian conception of art, but if it now exists for our pleasure
it is what we call art.
When anything is reclassified in this way, it loses much of its
original function. Even the most fanatical historical critic is bound
to see Shakespeare and Homer as writers whom we admire for rea-
sons that would have been largely unintelligible to them, to say
nothing of their societies. But we can hardly be satisfied with an
approach to works of art which simply strips from them their origi-
nal function. One of the tasks of criticism is that of the recovery of
function, not of course the restoration of an original function,
which is out of the question, but the recreation of function in a
new context.
Kierkegaard has written a fascinating little book called Repeti-
tion, in which he proposes to use this term to replace the more tra-
ditional Platonic term anamnesis or recollection. By it he appar-
ently means, not the simple repeating of an experience, but the
recreating of it which redeems or awakens it to life, the end of the
process, he says, being the apocalyptic promise: “Behold, I make all
things new." The preoccupation of the humanities with the past
is sometimes made a reproach against them by those who forget
that we face the past: it may be shadowy, bufit is all that is there.
Plato draws a gloomy picture of man staring at the flickering shapes
made on the wall of the objective world by a fire behind us like
the sun. But the analogy breaks down when the shadows are those
of the past, for the only light we can see them by is the Promethean
fire within us. The substance of these shadows can only be in our-
selves, and the goal of historical criticism, as our metaphors about
it often indicate, is a kind of self-resurrection, the vision of a valley
of dry bones that takes on the flesh and blood of our own vision.
345
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
The culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind, but
our own buried life, and study of it leads to a recognition scene,
a discovery in which we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural
form of our present life. It is not only the poet but his reader who
is subject to the obligation to “make it new.”
Without this sense of “repetition,” historical criticism tends to
remove the products of culture from our own sphere of interest.
It must be counterpoised, as it is in all genuine historical critics, by
a sense of the contemporary relevance of past art. But it is natural
that this sense of contemporary relevance should often be confined
to a specific issue in the present; that it should be thought of, not
as expanding the perspective of present life, but as supporting a
cause or thesis in the present.
If we cut through history at any point, including our own, and
study a cross-section of it, we get a class structure. Culture may be
employed by a social or intellectual class to increase its prestige;
and in general, moral censors, selectors of great traditions, apologists
of religious or political causes, aesthetes, radicals, codifiers of great
books, and the like, are expressions of such class tensions. We soon
realize, in studying their pronouncements, that the only really con-
sistent moral criticism of this type would be the kind which is
harnessed to an all-round revolutionary philosophy of society, such
as we find not only in Marxism but in Nietzsche and in some of
the rationalizations of oligarchic values in nineteenth-century Brit-
ain and twentieth-century America. In all these culture is treated
as a human productive power which in the past has been, like other
productive powers, exploited by other ruling classes and is now to be
revalued in terms of a better society. But as this ideal society exists
only in the future, the present valuation of culture is in terms of
its interim revolutionary effectiveness.
This revolutionary way of looking at culture is also as old as
Plato, the selected tradition being always some version of the argu-
ment about poets in the Republic. As soon as we make culture a
definite image of a future and perhaps attainable society, we start
selecting and purging a tradition, and all the artists who don't fit
(an increasing number as the process goes on) have to be thrown
out. So, just as historical criticism uncorrected relates culture only
to the past, ethical criticism uncorrected relates culture only to the
future, to the ideal society which may eventually come if we take
sufficient pains to guard the educating of our youth. For all such
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
lines of thought end in indoctrinating the next generation, just as
the moral version of Victorian progressivism led to Podsnap and
the blushing cheeks of the young person.
The body of work done in society, or civilization, both maintains
and undermines the class structure of that society. The social energy
which maintains the class structure produces perverted culture in
its three chief forms: mere upper-class culture, or ostentation, mere
middle-class culture, or vulgarity, and mere lower-class culture, or
squalor. These three classes are called by Matthew Arnold respec-
tively, in so far as they are classes, the barbarians, the philistines,
and the populace. Revolutionary action, of whatever kind, leads to
the dictatorship of one class, and the record of history seems clear
that there is no quicker way of destroying the benefits of culture. If
we attach our vision of culture to the conception of ruler-morality,
we get the culture of barbarians; if we attach it to the conception
of a proletariat, we get the culture of the populace; if we attach it
to any kind of bourgeois Utopia, we get the culture of philistinism.
Whatever one thinks of dialectic materialism as a philosophy, it
is certainly true that when men behave or pretend to behave like
material bodies they do behave dialectically. If England goes to war
with France, all the weaknesses in the English case and all the vir-
tues in the French case are ignored in England; not only is the trai-
tor the lowest of criminals, but it is indignantly denied that any
traitor can be honestly motivated. In war, the physical or idolatrous
substitute for the real dialectic of the spirit, one lives by half-truths.
The same principle applies to the verbal or mimic wars made out
of ''points of view,” which are usually the ghosts of some kind of
social conflict.
It seems better to try to get clear of all such conflicts, attaching
ourselves to Arnold's other axiom that "culture seeks to do away
with classes.” The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liber-
ate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving so-
ciety as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is
one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with
works of imagination. The imaginative element in works of art,
again, lifts them clear of the bondage of history. Anything that
emerges from the total experience of criticism to form part of a
liberal education becomes, by virtue of that fact, part of the emanci-
pated and humane community of culture, whatever its original ref-
erence. Thus liberal education liberates the works of culture them-
347
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
selves as well as the mind they educate. The corruption out of which
human art has been constructed will always remain in the art, but
the imaginative quality of the art preserves it in its corruption, like
the corpse of a saint. No discussion of beauty can confine itself to
the formal relations of the isolated work of art; it must consider,
too, the participation of the work of art in the vision of the goal
of social efEort, the idea of complete and classless civilization. This
idea of complete civilization is also the implicit moral standard to
which ethical criticism always refers, something very different from
any system of morals.
The idea of the free society implied in culture can never be formu-
lated, much less established as a society. Culture is a present social
ideal which we educate and free ourselves by trying to attain, and
never do attain. It teaches, with the endless patience of the book
which always presents the same words whenever we open it, but it
is not possessed, for the experiences and meanings attached to the
words are always new. No society can plan for its own culture un-
less it restricts the output of culture to socially predictable stand-
ards. The goal of ethical criticism is transvaluation, the ability to
look at contemporary social values with the detachment of one who
is able to compare them in some degree with the infinite vision
of possibilities presented by culture. One who possesses such a
standard of transvaluation is in a state of intellectual freedom. One
who does not possess it is a creature of whatever social values get
to him first: he has only the compulsions of habit, indoctrination,
and prejudice. The current tendency to insist that man cannot be
a spectator of his own life seems to me to be one of those lethal
half-truths that arise in response to some kind of social malaise.
Most ethical action is a mechanical reflex of habit: to get any prin-
ciple of freedom in it we need some kind of theory of action, theory
in the sense of theoria, a withdrawn or detached vision of the means
and end of action which does not paralyze action, but makes it pur-
poseful by enlightening its aims.
The two great classics of the theory of liberty in the modern
world, Areopagitica and MilFs Essay on Liberty, deal of course with
liberty in different contexts. For Milton culture is potential proph-
ecy, set in judgement over against the kind of social acceptance of
sanctioned error represented by the censor, whereas for Mill cul-
ture is a social critique. But allowing for this, both essays insist that
liberty can begin only with an immediate and present guarantee
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
of the autonomy of culture. In Mill unlimited liberty of thought
and discussion is not only the best way of developing liberty of ac-
tion, but the best way of controlling it, because it is the only means
of preventing impulsive or stampeded action. In Milton liberty of
conscience is not the freedom to listen to the compulsions acquired
in childhood which make up the greater part of what we ordinarily
call conscience, but the freedom to listen to the Word of God,
which, as it is a message from an infinite mind to a finite one, can
never be definitively understood by the latter.
At this point the theory of criticism seems ready to settle quietly
into the larger humanistic principle that the freedom of man is
inseparably bound up with his acceptance of his cultural heritage.
The writer believes this, of course, and so probably do most of those
who will read his book; but there may still be a residue from the
parasite fallacy of criticism, which all our arguments may not yet
have dispelled. This is the feeling that as criticism is based on cul-
tural products, the more important the critic claims his work to be,
the more he tends to magnify the normal pleasure that a cultivated
person finds in the arts into something awful and portentous, re-
placing culture with aesthetic superstition, literature with bardola-
try, of however sophisticated a kind.
This would be true if in fact the aesthetic or contemplative aspect
of art were the final resting place for either art or criticism. Here
again it is archetypal criticism that comes to our aid. We tried to
show in the second essay that the moment we go from the indi-
vidual work of art to the sense of the total form of the art, the art
becomes no longer an object of aesthetic contemplation but an
ethical instrument, participating in the work of civilization. In this
shift to the ethical, criticism as well as poetry is involved, though
some of the ways in which it is involved are not commonly recog-
nized as aspects of criticism. It is obvious, for instance, that one
major source of order in society is an established pattern of words.
In religion this may be a scripture, a liturgy, or a creed; in politics
it may be a written constitution or a set of ideological directives
like the pamphlets of Lenin in present-day Russia. Such verbal pat-
terns may remain fixed for centuries: the meanings attached to
them will change out of all recognition in that time, but the feel-
ing that the verbal structure must remain unchanged, and the con-
sequent necessity of reinterpreting it to suit the changes of history,
bring the operations of criticism into the center of society.
349
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
But we then had to complete our argument by removing all ex-
ternal goals from literature, thus postulating a self-contained liter-
ary universe. Perhaps in doing so we merely restored the aesthetic
view on a gigantic scale, substituting Poetry for a mass of poems,
aesthetic mysticism for aesthetic empiricism. The argument of our
last essay, however, led to the principle that all structures in words
are partly rhetorical, and hence literary, and that the notion of a
scientific or philosophical verbal structure free of rhetorical ele-
ments is an illusion. If so, then our literary universe has expanded
into a verbal universe, and no aesthetic principle of self-containment
will work.
I am not wholly unaware that at every step of this argument there
are extremely complicated philosophical problems which I am in-
competent to solve as such. I am aware also, however, of something
else. That something else is the confused swirl of new intellectual
activities today associated with such words as communication, sym-
bolism, semantics, linguistics, metalinguistics, pragmatics, cyber-
netics, and the ideas generated by and around Cassirer, Korzybsky,
and dozens of others in fields as remote (as they seemed until re-
cently) as prehistory and mathematics, logic and engineering, so-
ciology and physics. Many of these movements were instigated by
a desire to free the modern mind from the tyranny of emotional
rhetoric, from the advertising and propaganda that try to pervert
thought by a misuse of irony into conditioned reflex. Many of them
have also moved in the direction of conceptual rhetoric, reducing
the content of many arguments to their ambiguous or diagrammatic
structures. My knowledge of most of the books dealing with this
new material is largely confined, like Moses' knowledge of God
in the mount, to gazing at their spines, but it is clear to me that
literary criticism has a central place in all this activity, and from
the point of view of literary criticism I offer an admittedly very
speculative suggestion.
We have several times hinted at an analogy between literature
and mathematics. Mathematics appears to begin in the counting
and measuring of objects, as a numerical commentary on the out-
side world. But the mathematician does not think of his subject
so: for him it is an autonomous language, and there is a point at
which it becomes in a measure independent of that common field
of experience which we call the objective world, or nature, or exist-
ence, or reality, according to our mood. Many of its terms, such
350
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
as irrational numbers, have no direct connection with the common
field of experience, but depend for their meaning solely on the
interrelations of the subject itself. Irrational numbers in mathe-
matics may be compared to prepositions in verbal languages, the
centripetal character of which we have noted. When we distinguish
pure from applied mathematics, we are thinking of the former as
a disinterested conception of numerical relationships, concerned
more and more with its inner integrity, and less and less with its
reference to external criteria.
We think also of literature at first as a commentary on an ex-
ternal ''life'' or "reality." But just as in mathematics we have to
go from three apples to three, and from a square field to a square, so
in reading a novel we have to go from literature as reflection of
life to literature as autonomous language. Literature also proceeds
by hypothetical possibilities, and though literature, like mathe-
matics, is constantly useful— a word which means having a con-
tinuing relationship to the common field of experience— pure litera-
ture, like pure mathematics, contains its ovm meaning.
Both literature and mathematics proceed from postulates, not
facts; both can be applied to external reality and yet exist also in
a "pure" or self-contained fonn. Both, furthermore, drive a wedge
between the antithesis of being and non-being that is so important
for discursive thought. The symbol neither is nor is not the reality
which it manifests. The child beginning geometry is presented with
a dot and is told, first, that that is a point, and second, that it is
not a point. He cannot advance until he accepts both statements at
once. It is absurd that that which is no number can also be a num-
ber, but the result of accepting the absurdity was the discovery of
zero. The same kind of hypothesis exists in literature, where Ham-
let and Falstaff neither exist nor do not exist, and where an airy
nothing is confidently located and named. We notice that rhetoric
differs sharply from logic in that it invariably gives some positive
quality to a negative statement. Logic counts the negatives in a
statement and calls it affirmative if there is an even number, but no
one in the history of communication ever took "I hain't got no
money" to mean that the speaker did have money. Similarly in
literature: lago's urging Othello to beware of jealousy is designed
to plant jealousy in Othello's mind; the negatives at the beginning
of Gerontion mean logically that Gerontion is not a hero, but
rhetorically they build up a contrasting picture of sacrifice and
351
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
endurance. If the poet never afErmeth, he never denies either; and
in this respect Aristotle's opening statement about rhetoric, that it
is the dntistrophos or answering chorus of dialectic, breaks down.
In the final chapter of Sir James Jeans' The Mysterious Universe,
the author speaks of the failure of physical cosmology in the nine-
teenth century to conceive of the universe as ultimately mechanical,
and suggests that a mathematical approach to it may have better
luck. The universe cannot be a machine, but it may be an inter-
locking set of mathematical formulas. What this means is surely
that pure mathematics exists in a mathematical universe which is
no longer a commentary on an outside world, but contains that
world within itself. Mathematics is at first a form of understand-
ing an objective wdtld regarded as its content, but in the end it
conceives of the content as being itself mathematical in form, and
when a conception of a mathematical universe is reached, form
and content become the same thing. Mathematics relates itself in-
directly to the common field of experience, then, not to avoid it,
but with the ultimate design of swallowing it. It appears to be a
kind of informing or constructive principle in the natural sciences:
it continually gives shape and coherence to them without being
itself dependent on external proof or evidence, and yet finally the
physical or quantitative universe appears to be contained by mathe-
matics. The occult or mystical sound of Jeans' chapter, which never-
theless expresses a dream that has haunted mathematicians at least
since Pythagoras, may be compared with the religious terminology
we found ourselves compelled to use as soon as we reached the
corresponding conception of a literary or verbal uniy^e.
Other points in this analogy strike one: the curious snmiafityTn
form, for instance, between the units of literature and of mathe-
matics, the metaphor and the equation. Both of these are, in the
expanded sense of the term employed by many logicians, tautolo-
gies. But if the analogy is to hold, the question of course arises: is
literature like mathematics in being substantially useful, and not
just incidentally so? That is, is it true that the verbal structures
of psychology, anthropology, theology, history, law, and everything
else built out of words have been informed or constructed by the
same kind of myths and metaphors that we find, in their original
hypothetical form, in literature?
The possibility that seems to me suggested by the present dis-
cussion is as follows. Discursive verbal structures have two aspects,
35 ^
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
one descriptive, the other constructive, a content and a form. What
is descriptive is sigma tic: that is, it establishes a verbal replica of
external phenomena, and its verbal symbolism is to be understood
as a set of representative signs. But whatever is constructive in any
verbal structure seems to me to be invariably some kind of metaphor
or hypothetical identification, whether it is established among dif-
ferent meanings of the same word or by the use of a diagram. The
assumed metaphors in their turn become the units of the myth or
constructive principle of the argument. While we read, we are
aware of a sequence of metaphorical identifications; when we have
finished, we are aware of an organizing structural pattern or con-
ceptualized myth.
It looks now as though Freud's view of the Oedipus complex
were a psychological conception that throws some light on literary
criticism. Perhaps we shall eventually decide that we have got it the
wrong way round: that what happened was that the myth of Oedi-
pus informed and gave structure to some psychological investiga-
tions at this point. Freud would in that case be exceptional only
in having been well read enough to spot the source of the myth.
It looks now as though the psychological discovery of an oracular
mind ''underneath" the conscious one forms an appropriate al-
legorical explanation of a poetic archetype that has run through
literature from the cave of Trophonius to our own day. Perhaps it
was the archetype that informed the discovery: it is after all con-
siderably older, and to explain it in this way would involve us in
less anachronism. The informing of metaphysical and theological
constructs by poetic myths, or by associations and diagrams analo-
gous to poetic myths, is even more obvious.
Such an approach need not be distorted into a poetic determin-
ism, for, as has been said, it would be silly to use a reductive rhetoric
to try to prove that theology, metaphysics, law, the social sciences,
or whichever one or group of these we happen to dislike, are based
on "nothing but" metaphors or myths. Any such proof, if we are
right, would have the same kind of basis itself. Criticisms of truth
or adequacy, then, are mainly criticism of content, not form. Rous-
seau says that the original society of nature and reason has been
overlaid by the corruptions of civilization, and that a sufficiently
courageous revolutionary act could reestablish it. It is nothing either
for or against this argument to say that it is informed by the myth
of the sleeping beauty. But we cannot agree or disagree with Rous-
353
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
seau until we fully understand what he does say^, and while of course
we can understand him well enough without extracting the myth,
there is much to be gained by extracting the myth if the myth is
in fact, as we are suggesting here, the source of the coherence of
his argument. Such a view of the relation of myth to argument
would take us very close to Plato, for whom the ultimate acts of
apprehension were either mathematical or mythical.
Literature, like mathematics, is a language, and a language in
itself represents no truth, though it may provide the means for
expressing any number of them. But poets and critics alike have
always believed in some kind of imaginative truth, and perhaps the
justification for the belief is in the containment by the language
of what it can express. The mathematical and the verbal universes
are doubtless different ways of conceiving the same universe. The
objective world affords a provisional means of unifying experience,
and it is natural to infer a higher unity, a sort of beatification of
common sense. But it is not easy to find any language capable of
expressing the unity of this higher intellectual universe. Metaphys-
ics, theology, history, law, have all been used, but all are verbal
constructs, and the further we take them, the more clearly their
metaphorical and mythical outlines show through. Whenever we
construct a system of thought to unite earth with heaven, the story
of the Tower of Babel recurs: we discover that after all we can't
quite make it, and that what we have in the meantime is a plural-
ity of languages.
If I have read the last chapter of Finnegans Wake correctly,
what happens there is that the dreamer, after spending the night
in communion with a vast body of metaphorical identifications,
wakens and goes about his business forgetting his dream, like
Nebuchadnezzar, failing to use, or even to realize that he can use,
the ''keys to dreamland." What he fails to do is therefore left for
the reader to do, the "ideal reader suffering from an ideal insom-
nia," as Joyce calls him, in other words the critic. Some such ac-
tivity as this of reforging the broken links between creation and
knowledge, art and science, myth and concept, is what I envisage
for criticism. Once more, I am not speaking of a change of direc-
tion or activity in criticism: I mean only that if critics go on with
their own business, this will appear to be, with increasing obvious-
ness, the social and practical result of their labors.
354
NOTES
GLOSSARY
INDEX
NOTES
p. 5, line 7
p, g, line 24
p 15, line 7
p. 15, line 9
p. 18, line 38
p. 21, line 22
p. 37, line 1
p. 37, line 19
p. 41, line 7
p. 46, line 8
p 46, line 1 3
p. 53, line 23
p. 61, line 8
p, 61, line 37
"John Stuart Mill.” "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varie-
ties,” Dissertations and Discussions, Series I.
"Matthew Arnold.” "The Literary Influence of Academies,”
Essays in Criticism, First Series,
"whatever it is now.” This phrase expresses, not a contempt
for aesthetics, but a conviction that it is time for aesthetics
to get out from under philosophy, as psychology has already
done. Most philosophers deal with aesthetic questions only
as a set of analogies to their logical and metaphysical views,
hence it is difficult to use, say, Kant or Hegel on the arts
without getting into a Kantian or Hegelian "position.”
Aristotle is the only philosopher known to me who not
only talks specifically about poetics when he is aware of
larger aesthetic problems, but who assumes that such poetics
would be the organon of an independent discipline Conse-
quently a critic can use the Poetics without involving him-
self in Aristotelianism (though I know that some Aristote-
lian critics do not think so).
"state of naive induction.” I am indebted here to a passage
m Susanne K. Langer, The Practice of Philosophy (1930).
“better critics of all ages.” Shelley, for example, speaks in
A Defence of Poetry of "that great poem, which all poets,
like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built
up since the beginning of the world.”
"Arnold's 'touchstone' theory.” "The Study of Poetry,”
Essays in Criticism, Second Series.
"Beowulf.” The precise meaning of "enta geweorc” (2717)
does not affect the illustration.
"central position of high mimetic tragedy.” Cf. Louis L.
Martz, “The Saint as Tragic Hero,” Tragic Themes in West-
ern Literature, ed. Cleanth Brooks (1955), 176.
"Coleridge.” See Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed.
T. M. Raysor (1936}, 294; I have expanded what Coler-
idge says m order to bring out the critical principle involved,
"deliverance from the unpleasant,” Cf. Max Eastman, En-
joyment of Laughter (1936), which also provides some il-
luminating comments on the eiron and alazon roles,
"suggested for Old Comedy.” See Francis M. Comford,
The Origin of Attic Comedy (1934).
"named after its plot.” See R. S. Crane, "The Concept of
Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," Critics and Criticism, ed.
R. S. Crane (1952), 616 ff.
*‘Augenblick of modem German thought.” The Erkennung
of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (II, xii) is a less vague exam-
ple; it also illustrates the conception of thematic discovery
or recognition (p. 52; cf p. 302).
"One study.” Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton, The TeU~
Tale Article (1949).
357
NOTES
p. 71, line 1
p. 76, line 30
p. 82, line 2
p. 82, line 26
p. 86, line 21
p. 93, line 9
p. 95, line 18
p. 98, line 1
p. 99 line 34
p. 101, line 34
p. 103, line 16
''lack of a technical vocabulary/^ The revival of the techni-
cal language of rhetoric would not only provide us with
useful terms, but in many cases would revive the concep-
tions themselves which have been forgotten along with
their names. It may be true that, as Samuel Butler said:
... all a rhetorician's rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools
but if a critic cannot name his tools, the world is unlikely to
concede much authority to his craft. We should not entrust
our cars to a mechanic who lived entirely in a world of
gadgets and doohickeys.
"Dante says/' Epistola X, to Can Grande {Opere, cd,
Moore and Toynbee, 4th ed., 416). See also II Convivio,
II, i (op. cit., 251-252).
"What is now called 'new criticism.’ ” The account of
literal meaning given here depends on 1 . A. Richards, Rich-
ard Blackmur, William Empson (ambiguity), Cleanth
Brooks (literal irony), and John Crowe Ransom (texture)
in particular.
"the word form.” For the theory of the formal phase, I
have been considerably indebted to R. S. Crane, The Lan-
guages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953), as
well as to Critics and Criticism (1952), edited by him.
" 'the intentional fallacy/ ” See W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and
Monroe Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (1954), Ch. i. I have
taken the word "holism” (p. 326) from the same book,
p. 238.
"Yeats and Sturge Moore.” See W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge
Moore; Their Correspondence, 1901-1937 (1953).
"convention and genre.” The conception of the autonomy
of form in art is essential to the argument of Andr6 Mal-
raux. The Voices of Silence, tr. Stuart Gilbert (1953). In
modern English criticism the archetypal approach is highly
developed in both theory and practice. In theory, the books
of Maud Bodkin, Kenneth Burke, Gaston Bachelard, Fran-
cis Fergusson, and Philip Wheelwright are of obvious and
exceptional usefulness. See the excellent bibliographies in
Rend Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature
(1942), Ch. XV.
"remark of Mr. Eliot.” In his essay on Philip Massinger,
"literary adaptation of the ritual of the Adonis lament.” This
phrase should be understood in the light of the general
principle that "ritual” refers to content rather than source,
"clueless.” My only point is that there may not be any
point, but as Rose Armiger is a sister to dragons rather than
knights enant, there is a faint possibility of parody-symbol-
ism, discussed below.
"topoi.” For these see E. R. Curtius, European Literature
and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard Trask (1953), 79 fif.
An example of the point made in the text is the relation of
358
NOTES
p. 105, line 6
p. Ill, line 23
p. 113, line 32
p. 122, line 8
p. 122, line 22
p. 125, line 10
p. 135, line 10
p. 140, line 27
p, 141, line 21
p. 142, line 5
p. 144, line 1
p. 145, line 37
p. 146, line 4
Milton's first prolusion, “Whether Day is more excellent
than Night," to V Allegro and 11 Penseroso.
“the work of the dream." Throughout this book “dream"
is used in an extended sense to mean, not simply the fan-
tasies of the sleeping mind, but the whole interpenetrating
activity of desire and repugnance in shaping thought.
“actual content, its dianoia” The expression here is care-
less, as dianqia refers to form.
“its own object." I have taken this phrase from an oral lec-
ture by M. Jacques Maritain.
“a letter of Rilke." Letter to Ellen Delp, October 27, 191 5.
“universal human body." To these should be added the
great meditation on time in the second part of he Temps
RetrouvS, One wonders if there is anything more than doubt-
ful puns connecting the anagogic perspective in literature
with Kant’s conception of “transcendental aesthetic" as the
a priori consciousness of space and time.
“Coleridge." Coleridge*s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T.
M. Raysor (1936), 343.
“credible facts." I pass over the point that the younger
brother is warned of his danger by the elder brother’s cow.
“hero descending." The statement that Hamlet descends
into the grave is expendable, but the contrast in his mood
before and after the scene indicates some kind of rite de
passage,
“grammar of apocalyptic imagery." For Biblical typology a
useful book is Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images (1949).
See also Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity
(1954)-
“ 'figura.’ " See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, tr. Willard Trask
(1953)- 73 -
“Of birds." Several poems by Wallace Stevens, including
“The Dove in the Belly," employ this symbolism. Other
favored members of the animal kingdom include the fish
and the dolphin, traditionally Christian in contrast to the
leviathan, and among insects the bee, so beloved of Virgil,
whose sweetness and light are a contrast to the devouring
spider. Cf. Dame Edith Sitwell’s poem, “The Bee Oracles. ’
The old theory of “primates" in the various kingdoms is
connected with this symbolic use of typical representatives,
“burning man." Cf. D. H. Lawrence’s remarks on vermilion
paint in Etruscan Places, Ch. in.
“In alchemy." For alchemical symbolism see Herbert Sil-
berer. Problems of Mysticispi and its Symbolism, tr. Smith
Ely Jelliffe (1917), and C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alche-
my, tr. R. F. C. Hull (1953). Allegorical alchemy, Rosi-
crucianism. Cabbalism, Freemasonry, and the Tarot pack are
all typological constructs based on paradigms similar to
those given here. For the literary critic they are simply ref-
erence tables: the atmosphere of oracular harrumph about
359
NOTES
pp. 159-160
p. 165, line 28
p. 166, line 14
p. 168, line 39
p. 171, line 28
p. 173, line 28
p. 178, line 34
p. 183, line 30
p. 186, line 32
them, which recurs in some forms of archetypal criticism^
is not much to the point.
'‘Animal lives." Hence the relation of animal symbolism to
the phase of the cycle is characterized by the choice of
animal rather than by its age. We expect to find deer in
romances and rats in The Waste Land.
“carefully marked." Volpone, V, ii, 12-14.
''Tractatus Coislinianus.'' See Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian
Theory of Comedy (1922).
“Mr. E. M. Forster." Aspects of the Novel (1927), Ch. i.
It would perhaps be better to draw the contrast between a
fictional repetition like Mrs. Micawber's formula, and a
thematic repetition, like Matthew Arnold's deliberate echo-
ing ad nauseam of fatuous phrases used by his opponents.
For the role of such thematic repetitions in Forster's own
work, see E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (1950).
“occupies the middle action." Hence the archetype of the
blocking character in comedy is the “interrex" or deputy
ruler: see Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis (1950), 34. Angelo
in Measure for Measure is the clearest example.
“amateur detective of modern fiction." This is his naive
incarnation; in more sophisticated comedy a popular form
of gracioso is the dandy, a disengaged figure whose epigrarns
are largely inverted cliches, whose attitude is that of comic
scorn for sentimentality as described on p. 48, and who is
normally a conservative, opposed to a group of humors who
feel that they are progressive because they all face in the
same direction. He is well exhibited in Wilde's An Ideal
Husband. In the twenties the dandy revived, both fictionally
and thematically, in Firbank, Huxley, Waugh, the Knicker-
bocker figure of The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
“and then reverses the action." The impetus of irony or
“realism" is toward a conclusion which remains within the
state of experience; the impetus of comedy is toward a lift
out of that state. Which conclusion the author chooses is
often a matter of a sentence or two, like a piece of music
in a minor key which may or may not end on the parallel
major chord. Besides The Beggafs Opera, Dickens's Great
Expectations and Charlotte Bronte's Villette go to the length
of providing alternative endings, one conventionally comic,
the other more equivocal.
“ ‘behind the eight-ball.' " I forget where I read this, but
perhaps the reader will excuse the reference.
“endless form." This endless form has many literary mani-
festations: in the sequence of stories based on the same
formula, like The Monk's Tale in Chaucer and its slower-
witted descendants in Lydgate and The Mirror for Magis-
trates; in the arbitrarily determined number of stories to be
told in a given situation, like the thousand and one that
Scheherezade tells for dear life; in the curiously muted con-
clusion of Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, which, though a
^60
NOTES
logical enough conclusion, would hardly have precluded the
author from starting again. For its appearance in drama, see
the note to p. 289. The principle of discovery, which brings
the end into line with the beginning, gives to the symmetri-
cal plot its characteristic parabola shape.
p. 187, line 10 '‘using Greek terms.” That is, using the terms employed by
Sir Gilbert Murray in his Excursus in Jane Harrison, ThemiSy
2nd ed. (1927), 341 jBF.
p. 188, line 18 "'subconscious' factor.” It should also be said, however,
that archetypal criticism, which can do nothing but abstract
and typify and reduce to convention, has only a "subcon-
scious” role in the direct experience of literature, where
uniqueness is everything. In direct experience we are dimly
aware of familiar conventions, but as a rule we are con-
sciously aware of them only when we are bored or disap-
pointed, and feel that there is nothing new here. Hence the
usual confusion between direct experience and criticism may
well lead to the feeling that archetypal criticism is simply
bad criticism, as in some pronouncements of Mr. Wynd-
ham Lewis.
p. 191, line 17 ^Taradise Regained See "The Typology of Paradise Re-
gained,' Modern Philology (1956), 227 ff.
p. 192, line 26 "central unifying myth.” Cf. Joseph Campbell, The Hero
with a Thousand Faces (1949); Lord Raglan, The Hero
(1936); C. G. Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido,
soon to be retranslated in the Bollingen series as Symbols
of Transformation, and the account of the "eniautos-dai-
mon” in Jane Harrison, Themis. To these perhaps I may
add my own account of Blake's Ore symbolism in Fearful
Symmetry (1947), Ch. vii.
p. 194, line 6 "we are told.” Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance
(1920).
p. 194, line 25 "identified.” The Biblical identification is in Rev. 12:9,
from which the phrase "that old dragon” in the head verse
to Canto XI comes.
p. 198, line 8 "studied in some detail.” See Otto Rank, The Myth of the
Birth of the Hero (1910); also C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi,
Essays toward a Science of Mythology, tr. R. F. C. Hull
(1949).
p. 201, line 13 "natural sequel to the first book.” The archetype is that of
the building of a habitation for the god or hero after his tri-
umph: cf. Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis, 163. The phrase
"Beauty and money” is from Faerie Queene, II, xi. For the
distinctions between temperance and continence and the two
levels of nature, see A. S. P. Woodhouse, "Nature and
Grace in The Faerie Queene/' ELH (1949), 194 ff. and
"The Argument of Milton's Comus," University of Toronto
Quarterly (1941), 46 ff*
p. 203, line 35 "analogues of the Biblical stories of the Fall.” See Apollodo-
rus. Bibliotheca, ed. Frazer (Loeb Classical Library, 1921);
361
NOTES
p. 204, line 2
p. 208, line 23
p. 214, line 20
p. 228, line 17
p. 231, line 31
p. 235, line 3
p. 237, line 7
p. 244, line 20
p. 245, line 40
p. 250, line 37
p. 253, line 24
p. 258, line 13
p. 259, line 2
p. 261, line 26
p. 264, line 32
362
Sir James Frazer, Folk Lore in the Old Testament, Vol. I
(1918); Leo Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, tr. A. H.
Keane (1909).
'' 'gold bug’ in Poe’s story.” This example will not please
the oh-come-now school of criticism, but is added because
it illustrates the principle that logical construction, in a
popular tale, is a matter of the linking of archetypes. The
use of the gold bug to discover the treasure is, from the ir-
relevant point of view of plausibility, unnecessary, and only
the lamest excuse is given for it in the dialogue,
“rise of Ionian and of Renaissance science.” Cf. A. N.
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. i.
“treatment of the tragic vision.” See Also Sprach Zara-
thustra, III, IviL Zarathustra is at the point of epiphany,
with the cyclical world below him; as his vision is primarily
that of the tragic hero, his natural movement is downward
into the cycle. Like the Father’s speech in Milton, to which
it affords an instructive parallel, the argument itself may
be unconvincing, but the reason for its being there is plain
enough. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and Yeats’s Dialogue of
Self and Soul, which deal with the same archetype from di-
rectly opposed points of view, are much clearer in structure,
“does not need a great person.” Chaucer’s pardoner is a
perhaps better example,
“Charles Fort.” See The Books of Charles Fort (1941), 435.
“Emerson says.” Nature, vi.
“Coriolanus.” See Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox
(19^7)'
“Ezra Pound.” ABC of Reading, Ch. iv. Melopoiia is actu-
ally Aristotle’s word: I use melos because it is short.
“Coleridge.” From the Essay on Method in The Friend,
iv. I do not claim that I am correctly interpreting Coleridge’s
term, but the necessity of being a terminological buccaneer
should be clear enough by now.
“no controlling rhythm.” No specifically verbal rhythm, that
is: the controlling rhythm of drama is the rhythm of its
production on the stage.
“his own modification.” I should modify it myself to make
the beat “on no side” begin with an eighth rest.
“recurrent Alexandrine.” Also by a number of six-stress
pentameters; see “Lexis and Melos,” Sound and Poetry
{English Institute Essays 195^; forthcoming).
“treatise on rhetoric.” Rhetoric III, xi; but the actual use of
the line (Od. xi, 598) as a blackboard example of imitative
harmony comes rather from Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
“ 'ten low words.’ ” Essay on Criticism, 347; what is wrong
with the line, of course, is not too many monosyllables, but
too many stressed accents.
“ 'Senecan amble.’ ” See the book of that title by George
Williamson (1951).
NOTES
p. 265, line 37
p. 268, line 1 3
p. 269, line 33
p. 272, line 19
p. 275, line 20
p. 278; line 23
p. 281, line 25
p. 284, line 1
p. 286, line 34
p. 289, line 14
p. 290, line 7
p. 293, line 21
p. 317, line 10
p. 320, line 36
p. 326, line 8
p. 328, line 10
^‘Wulfstan/' Another text of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
adds two more alliterative pairs to the quotation given, in-
dicating a certain ad libitum quality in such rhetoric.
''Cassiodorus.'' Quoted from W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages
(1911), 119.
‘'literary mannerism/^ Cf. T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama
(1951)-
“ ‘true voice of feeling/ See the book of that title by Sir
Herbert Read (1953).
“little has yet been said.'’ See however the conception of
“parody” in Frederick W. Sternfeld, Goethe and Music
(1954)-
Camellia Sabina** See Marianne Moore, Selected Poems
(1935); the scheme of the poem is altered in later editions,
“thirty-eight phrases.” The book examined was Oscar Wil-
liams, The Man Coming Toward You (1940); the only
point made by the count is that modern diction is as con-
ventionalized as any other diction.
“secular Eucharist symbol.” We may glance in passing at
the conclusion of Richard III (V, iv, 31-32) :
And then, as we have ta’en the sacrament,
We will unite the white rose and the red.
“preface to Getting Married.** More exactly, in a prefatory
note separated from the preface.
“tendency to linear movement.” For this processional struc-
ture, so much disliked by Aristotle, cf. the note to p. 186.
The hypothesis that Shakespeare may have used a collabora-
tor in Pericles does not affect my statements about it.
“said to be descended.” See Enid Welsford, The Court
Masque (1927).
“along with such epos forms.” An extremely complicated
problem, the problem of the intervening generic stages be-
tween lyric and epos, has had to be omitted from this dis-
cussion.
“two epic frameworks.” In G. R. Levy, The Sword from the
Rock (1954), three types of epic structure are recognized:
mythical epics, quest-epics, and conflict-epics. As far as the
epic material used is concerned, these correspond roughly
to our mythical, romantic and high mimetic encyclopaedic
forms.
“in France.” See H. J. Hunt, The Epic in Nineteenth-Cen-^
tury France ( 1941 ) .
“a Longinian point of view.” This conception of Aristote-
lian aesthetic catharsis and Longinian psycholo^cal ecstasis
as complementary to one another (cf. p. 66 ) is explained
perhaps more coherently in “Towards Defining an Age of
Sensibility,” ELH (1956), 1445., in connection with
eighteenth-century English literature,
“Swinburne.” The passage, if it matters, comes from his
introduction to the Mermaid Series edition of Middleton,
ed. Havelock Ellis (1887).
3^3
NOTES
p. 334, line 10
p. 341, line 24
p. 349, line 40
p. 353, line 5
p. 334, line 7
‘"possibility of links/' For a criticism of some of the views
here advanced, see Donald Davie, Articulate Energy (1955),
130 ff,
“allegorical explanations of myths/' See Jean Seznec, The
Survival of the Pagan Gods, tr. Barbara Sessions (1953),
Bk. II.
“center of society." Cf. Ezra Pound's conception of the
“unwobbling pivot."
“some kind of metaphor." The critic would of course need
to distinguish an explicit metaphor from a metaphorical
verbal construct. "‘X has a bee in his bonnet about Y" is
an explicit metaphor; “X has got the notion Y into his head"
is the verbal frame of the same metaphor, but for ordinary
purposes it would pass as a simply descriptive statement,
“either mathematical or mythical." It is difficult to see how
aesthetic theory can get much further without recognizing
the creative element in mathematics. The arts might be
more clearly understood if they were thought of as forming
a circle, stretching from music through literature, painting
and sculpture to architecture, with mathematics, the missing
art, occupying the vacant place between architecture and
music. Tbe feeling that mathematics belongs to science
rather than art is largely due to the fact that mathematics is
an art that we know how to use. The difference between
mathematics and literature on this point will be greatly re-
duced when criticism achieves its proper form of the theory
of the use of words.
364
GLOSSARY
(This glossary omits the regular Aristotelian, rhetorical, and critical terms
which are also employed in this book.)
Alazon: a deceiving or self-deceived character in fiction, normally an ob-
ject of ridicule in comedy or satire, but often the hero of a tragedy.
In comedy he most frequently takes the form of a miles gloriosus or a
pedant.
Anagogic: Relating to literature as a total order of words.
Anatomy: A form of prose fiction, traditionally known as the Menippean
or Varronian satire and represented by Burton’s Anatomy of Melan-
choly, characterized by a great variety of subject-matter and a strong
interest in ideas. In shorter forms it often has a cena or symposium
setting and verse interludes.
Apocalyptic: The thematic term corresponding to '"myth"' in fictional
literature: metaphor as pure and potentially total identification, with-
out regard to plausibility or ordinary experience.
Archetype: A symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in
literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience
as a whole.
Auto: A form of drama in which the main subject is sacred or sacrosanct
legend, such as miracle plays, solemn and processional in form but not
strictly tragic. Name taken from Calderon’s Autos Sacramentales.
Confession: Autobiography regarded as a form of prose fiction, or prose fic-
tion cast in the form of autobiography.
Dianoia: The meaning of a work of literature, which may be the total pat-
tern of its symbols (literal meaning), its correlation with an external
body of propositions or facts (descriptive meaning), its theme, or rela-
tion as a form of imagery to a potential commentary (formal meaning),
its significance as a literary convention or genre (archetypal meaning),
or its relation to total literary experience (anagogic meaning).
Displacement: The adaptation of myth and metaphor to canons of moral-
ity or plausibility.
Eiron: a self-deprecating or unobtrusively treated character in fiction, usu-
ally an agent of the happy ending in comedy and of the catastrophe in
tragedy.
Encyclopaedic Form: A genre presenting an anagogic form of symbolism,
such as a sacred scripture, or its analogues in other modes. The term
includes the Bible, Dante’s Commedia, the great epics, and the works
of Joyce and Proust.
Epos: The literary genre in which the radical of presentation is the author
or minstrel as oral reciter, with a listening audience in front of him.
Ethos: The internal social context of a work of literature, comprising the
characterization and setting of fictional literature and the relation of
the author to his reader or audience in thematic literature.
Fiction: Literature in which the radical of presentation is the printed or
written word, such as novels and essays.
Fictional: Relating to literature in which there axe internal characters,
apart from the author and his audience; opposed to thematic. (N.B.
GLOSSARY
The use of this term is regrettably inconsistent with the preceding one,
as noted on p. 248.)
High mimetic: A mode of literature in which, as in most epics and trage-
dies, the central characters are above our own level of power and au-
thority, though within the order of nature and subject to social criti-
cism.
Image: A symbol in its aspect as a formal unit of art with a natural content.
Initiative: A primary consideration governing the process of composition,
such as the metre selected for a poem; taken from Coleridge.
Ironic: A mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of
action inferior to the one assumed to be normal in the reader or audi-
ence, or in which the poef s attitude is one of detached objectivity.
Irony: The mythos (sense 2) of the literature concerned primarily with a
"'realistic" level of experience, usually taking the form of a parody or
contrasting analogue to romance. Such irony may be tragic or comic
in its main emphasis; when comic it is normally identical with the usual
meaning of satire.
Lexis: The verbal "texture" or rhetorical aspect of a work of literature, in-
cluding the usual meanings of the terms "diction" and "imagery."
Low mimetic: A mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power
of action which is roughly on our own level, as in most comedy and
realistic fiction.
Lyric: A literary genre characterized by the assumed concealment of the
audience from the poet and by the predominance of an associational
rhythm distinguishable both from recurrent metre and from semantic
or prose rhythm.
Masque: A species of drama in which music and spectacle play an important
role and in which the characters tend to be or become aspects of hu-
man personality rather than independent characters.
Melos : The rhythm, movement, and sound of words; the aspect of litera-
ture which is analogous to music, and often shows some actual relation
to it. From Aristotle’s melopoiia.
Metaphor; A relation between two symbols, which may be simple juxta-
position (literal metaphor), a rhetorical statement of likeness or simi-
larity (descriptive metaphor), an analogy of proportion among four
terms (formal metaphor), an identity of an individual with its class
(concrete universal or archetypal metaphor), or statement of hypo-
thetical identity (anagogic metaphor).
Mode: A conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters
in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the
poet toward his audience in thematic literature. Such modes tend to
succeed one another in a historical sequence.
Monad: A symbol in its aspect as a center of one’s total literary experience;
related to Hopkins’s term "inscape" and to Joyce’s term "epiphany."
Motif: A symbol in its aspect as a verbal unit in a work of literary art.
Myth: A narrative in which some characters are superhuman beings who
do things that "happen only in stories"; hence, a conventionalized or
stylized narrative not fully adapted to plausibility or "realism."
Mythos: (1) The narrative of a work of literature, considered as the gram-
inar or order of words (literal narrative), plot or "argument" (descrip-
tive narrative), secondary imitation of action (formal narrative), imita-
366
GLOSSARY
tion of generic and recunent action or ritual (archetypal narrative),
or imitation of the total conceivable action of an omnipotent god or
human society (anagogic narrative). (2) One of the four archetypal
narratives, classified as comic, romantic, tragic, and ironic.
Naive: Primitive or popular, in the sense given those terms of an ability to
communicate in time and space more readily than other types of litera-
ture.
Opsis: The spectacular or visible aspect of drama; the ideally visible or pic-
torial aspect of other literature.
Pharmakos: The character in an ironic fiction who has the role of a scape-
goat or arbitrarily chosen victim.
Phase: (1) One of the five contexts in which the narrative and meaning of
a work of literature may be considered, classified as literal, descriptive,
formal, archetypal, and anagogic. (2) One of six distinguishable stages
of a mythos (sense 2).
Point of epiphany: An archetype presenting simultaneously an apocalyptic
world and a cyclical order of nature, or sometimes the latter alone. Its
usual symbols are ladders, mountains, lighthouses, islands, and towers.
Romance: (1) The mythos of literature concerned primarily with an ideal-
ized world. (2) A form of prose fiction practised by Scott, Hawthorne,
William Morris, etc., distinguishable from the novel.
Romantic: (1) A fictional mode in which the chief characters live in a
world of marvels (naive romance), or in which the mood is elegiac
or idyllic and hence less subject to social criticism than in the mimetic
modes. (2) The general tendency to present myth and metaphor in
an idealized human form, midway between undisplaced myth and
''realism.”
Sign: A symbol in its aspect as a verbal representative of a natural object
or concept.
Symbol: Any unit of any work of literature which can be isolated for critical
attention. In general usage restricted to the smaller imits, such as words,
phrases, images, etc.
Thematic: Relating to works of literature in which no characters are in-
volved except the author and his audience, as in most lyrics and es-
says, or to works of literature in which internal characters are subordi-
nated to an argument maintained by the author, as in allegories and
parables; opposed to fictional.
367
INDEX
Works will be found unier the author's name.
accent and stress, 251-58, 261, 270,
279
Achilles, 199
Adam and Eve, 42, 151, 152, 188-90,
194, 196, 199, 207, 211-13, 217,
220, 316, 319-21
Addison, Joseph, The Spectator, 261
Adler, Alfred, 214
Adonis, 118, 121, 153, 160, 189, 205,
296-97
Aeschylus, 215; Agamemnon, 217;
Oresteia, 209; The Persians, 94,
289; Prometheus Bound, 222-23;
The Suppliants, 283
aesthetics, 15, i5n, 26, 114-16, 308,
326, 341, 344-45, 349-50^ 354n
agon, 187, 192
alazon, 39, 40, 172, 176, 182, 217,
226-28
alchemy, 146, i46n, 157, 195
Aldhelm, 294
Alger, Horatio, 19, 45
allegory, 53, 54, 72, 89-91, 103, 116,
138, 201, 304, 306, 316, 341-42
ambiguity and association, 65, 72,
83, 272, 273, 275-78, 293-94, 334-
American Indians, 55, 332-33
Amory, Thomas, John Buncle, 312
Amos, 300
anagogic meaning, 72, 116-38, i22n,
^34^ H5
anagnorisis {cognitio, recognition,
discovery), 41, 52, 163, 170, 180,
184, i86n, 187, 192, 212, 214,
218, 289, 291, 301-02, 316, 346;
see also epiphany
ananke, 210
anatomy, 298, 308-14, 322, 325
Andreyev, Leonid, The Black Mask-
ers, 291
Andromeda, 36, 196
Angelo, 165-67, 1710, 178
Angst, yj, 66, 213
antimasque, 171, 290
Apemantus, 176
apocalypse and apocalyptic symbol-
ism, 119, 125, 139-46, 148, 151,
154-55, 157-58, 162, 185, 191,
194-95, 203-06, 292, 300, 315-17,
319-20, 523-24
Apollo and the Apollonian, 43, 214,
215, 292, 321
Apuleius, 152, 196, 234, 235, 309,
313^ 322
Arabian Nights, 35, i86n, 193, 324
archetypes and archetypal criticism,
vii, 72, 95n, 99-112, 115-19, 121,
124, 134-35, 136-62, 184, i88n,
200, 203-04, 211-14, 220, 227,
293, 297, 304-05, 314-16, 321-22,
325, 341-42, 349, 353-54; arche-
^pal masque, 290-93
architectus, 174, 197, 216
Ariel, 152, 174
Arion, 152
Ariosto, Lodovico, 58, 90, 196, 204;
Orlando Furioso, 58
Aristophanes, 43-46, 65, 163, 174,
177, 215; The Achamians, 163;
The Birds, 44, 169, 177; The
Clouds, 46; Ecclesiazusae, 169,
177; The Frogs, 21, 163; The
Knights, 183; Lysistrata, 202; The
Peace, 177; The Wasps, 169
Aristotle, 13, 14, 34, 38, 40, 41, 44,
65-67, 71, 72, 95, 123, 131, 156,
172, 206, 207, 210, 212, 243, 244,
255, 259, 292, 326, 3260, 332,
33 345 ; 352; Ethics, 40, 172;
Physics, 126; Poetics, 14, 15, i5n,
33, 51, 52, 82, 124, 166, 245;
Rhetoric, 166, 352
Armstrong, Dr. John, The Art of
Preserving Health, 161
Arnold, Matthew, 3, 8-10, 12, 21-23,
100, 127, 156, i68n, 264, 347;
Thyrsis, 100, 257
Arthur, 145
Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, 311
Athene, 157, 195, 201, 209, 320-22
Attis, 187
369
INDEX
Auden^ W. H., 280; Kairos and Log-
os, 153
Augenblick, 61, 213
Augustine, St, 213, 235, 307, 315
aureate diction, 280
Austen, Jane, 53, 84, 114, 162, 304,
308, 309; Northanger Abbey, 306;
Pride and Prejudice, 49, 226;
Sense and Sensibility, 53
auto, 282-84, 287-92
babble, 275-78, 334
Babel, Tower of, 206, 354
Babylon, 189, 191, 317
Bach, J. S., 104; St Matthew Pas-
sion, 215
Bacon, Sir Francis, 15, 125, 161, 329;
Essays, 264
Balder, 36
ballad, 57, 251, 296
Balzac, Honord de, 39, 45
Barbizon school, 132
Bassanio, 166
Baudelaire, Charles, 238, 297; Fleurs
du Mai, 66
Beerbohm, Max, Zuleika Dobson, 87
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 133, 266,
275; Fifth Symphony, 133
Belch, Sir Toby, 175
Benson, Arthur; The Phoenix, 277
Bentham, Jeremy, 263
Beowulf, 36, 37, 186, 191, 198, 221
Bergson, Henri, 333, 33;
Bernard of Clairvaux, 316
Bertram, 176, 180
Bible, 14, 34, 43, 54, 56, 76, 87, 96,
lor, 108, 116, 125, 140, 141-46,
152, 181, 188-89, 194, 198, 214,
264, 294, 298, 314, 315-26; Old
Testament, 35, 55, 56, 156, 190,
199, 221, 315, 31^ 322; New Tes-
tament, 149, 150, 199, 315, 316,
329; see separate books
Blaclcmore, Sir Richard, 1 5
Blaclcmore, Richard, Lorna Doone,
138
Blacksmiths, The, 262
Blake, William, vii, 46, 60, 65, 77,
94, 119, 147, 151, 194, 270, 274,
299; The Book of Thel, 200; The
Four Zoos, 302; The Marriage of
370
Heaven and Hell, 298; The Mental
Traveller, 322-23
Blunderbore, 228
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 103; Decamer-
on, 307
Boethius, 317; Consolation of Phi-
losophy, 312
Borrow, George, 304, 313; Lavengro,
303
Boy Bishop, 1 52
Bradley, A. C., 8
Braque, Georges, 136
Bridges, Robert, 270
Britomart, 151
Britten, Benjamin, 136
Bronte, Charlotte, lySn, 306
Bronte, Emily, 304, 306; Wuthering
Heights, 39, 50, 101, 304
Browne, Sir TTiomas, 145, 267; Re-
ligio Medici, 307; Urn Burial, 264,
297
Browning, Robert, 40, 226, 237, 255,
256, 269, 285; Caliban upon Sete-
bos, 226; Childe Roland, 149; The
Flight of the Duchess, 255; The
Heretic* s Tragedy, 257; Red Cot-
ton Nightcap Country, 262; The
Ring and the Book, 246; Sludge
the Medium, 231
Brunnhilde, 193
Buddha, 159
buffoon, 172-73, 175, 179, 197, 217,
220
Bunyan, John, 90, 114; Grace
Abounding, 307; The Holy War,
201; The Pilgrim* s Progress, 53,
58, 90. 91, 144, 157, 194, 305, 306
Burke, Edmund, 300
Bums, Robert, 22, 306; Holy Wil-
lie* s Prayer, 232, The Jolly Beggars,
257
Burton, Robert, 153, 230, 236, 266-
67, 311-12, 322; Anatomy of Mel-
ancholy, 311
Busirane, 152
Butler, Samuel, yin, 230; The Ele-
phant in the Moon, 231; Hudi-
bras, 231, 277
Butler, Samuel, 89, 154, 230, 308;
Erewhon, 154, 229, 231-32, 308;
The Fair Haven, 135; Life and
IMDSX
Habit, 1 54; The Way of All Flesh,
232, 308
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 60;
Don Juan, 234
Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 282
Caliban, 153, 165, 176
Calpurnius, 295
Camoens, Luis de, Lusiad, 58
Campion, Thomas, 274
Capek, the brothers, 297
Carlyle, Thomas, 21, 92, 154, 236,
306, 328; Sartor Resartus, 88, 267,
303, 313, 325
Carroll, Lewis, Alice books, 225, 310
Cary, Joyce, The Horse's Mouth, 48
Cassandra, 218
Cassiodorus, 268
Cassirer, Ernst, 10, 350
Castell of Perseveraunce, 201, 291
Castiglione, Baldassare, 93, 166, 310
catachresis, 281
catharsis, 66-67, 93-94, 210, 215,
282, 284, 301, 326, 326n
Cecilia ode, bt., 295
Celtic literature, 34, 55, 57, 58
Cervantes Saavedra, Jsiiguel de, Don
Quixote, 163, 180, 197, 223, 225,
229, 306, 313
C6zanne, Paul, 132, 134
chanting, 273-74
Chaplin, Charles, 42, 163, 228, 288;
The Great Dictator, 163
Chardin, Jean Simeon, 132
charm, 278, 280, 295
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 22, 51, 96, 103,
162, 227, 228n, 231, 248, 232,
311; Canterbury Tales, 51, 201;
The Franklin's Tale, 202; The
Knight's Tale, 103, 219; The Leg-
end of Good Women, 262; The
Man of Law's Tale, 49, 199; The
Miller's Tale, 114; The Monk's
Tale, 162, i86n, 212; The Parlia-
ment of Fowls, 299; The Second
Nun's Tale, 114; The Wife of
Bath's Tale, 193
Chekhov, Anton, 178, 305; The
Three Sisters, 285
Chenier, Andr6 de, 320
Chesterfield, Lord, 327
Chinese literature, 144, 156, 288, 297
chorus, 175, 218
Christianity, 12, 34, 35, 43, 64, 120,
126-27, 133, 142, 208-09, 212-13
Christmas, 159, 292
Chronicles, 325
Churchill, Sir Winston, 327
churl, 172, 175-76, 197, 218, 227
Cieero, 264, 268
Cinderella archetype, 44
Circe, 149, 157, 323
Classical mythology, 10, 10, 34, 35,
43. 54- 57’ i'?!, 120, 131, 133,
161, 212, 268
Claudel, Paul, 293
Claudian; de Raptu proserpinae, 49
Cleopatra, 237, 323
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 270
Cocteau, Jean, 138
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8, 41, 72,
103, 125-27, 235, 326; Christabel,
254; Kubla Khan, 145, 215, 302
Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in
White, 101
Collins, William, Ode on the Poetu
cal Character, 302
comedy (drama), 13, 40, 75, 112,
114, 117, 269, 282, 284-87, 289-
90, 297-98
comedy {mythos), 22, 35, 43-48, 54,
64-65, 105, 157, 162, 163-86, 193-
94, 198, 202, 206-07, 210, 212-14,
218-19, 224, 226-27, 3^4
commentary, 86-91, 116, 125, 341-
42. 350
confession, 307-08, 312-14
Congreve, William, 48, 252, 269-
Loye for Love, 181
Conrad, Joseph, 100, 140, 155,
237, 247, 267; Heart of Darkness,
40; Lord Jim, 39, 40, 237, 306;
Nostromo, 193
convention, 76, 95-105, 132, 134,
181, 202, 225, 247, 278, 281, 293
Cordelia, 38, 311, 316
Corin, 176
Corneille, Pierre, Le Cid, 283
cosmology, 160-62, 204, 214
Courtly Love, 63, 153, 297
Cowley, Abraham, 257, 260; Pavi-
deis, 260
37 ^
INDEX
Crabbc, George, The Learned Boy,
230; The Patron, 227
Crashaw, Richard, 59, 257, 302; Mu-
sick's Duell, 257
Cupid and Psyche, 1 52.
culture, 3, 12, 115, 127, 344-49
Cummings, E. E., 278
Cursor Mundi, 57
cyclical symbolism, 158-62, 316-24,
343
Dadaism, 92
Daniel, 149, 150
danse macabre, 233, 297-98
Dante, 5, 10, 57, 64, 72, 76, 77, 85,
88, 90, 100, 116, 117, 121, 145,
152-53, 156, 161-62, 199, 205,
233, 316-17, 323; Commedia, 43,
57, 77, 160, 317; Jn/crno, 58, 147-
48, 150, 223, 239, 321; Paradiso,
45, 94, 124, 144, 185, 204; Purga-
torio, 117, 145, 198-200, 204
Darwin, Erasmus, The Loves of the
Plants, 161
David, 228, 295
decorum, 223, 268-71, 273
Defoe, Daniel, 34, 41, 50, 135, 304;
Journal of the Plague Year, 135;
Moll Flanders, 307
Degas, H. G, E., 114, 136
Dekker, Thomas, The Shoemaker's
Holiday, 175
Deloney, Thomas, 303
Demetrius and Lysander, 167
Democritus, 230
demonic symbolism, 139-40, 147-51,
154-58, 162, 178, 187, 226, 290;
demonic modulation, 156-57
Denham, John, 154
Deor, Complaint of, ly]
De Quincey, Thomas, 267, 313
descriptive meaning, 73-82, 87, 92,
97, 116, 119, 123
determinism, 6
diagrams in thought, 335-37, 353
dialectic, 24-25, 286, 327, 329, 352
dianoia (theme, meaning), 52, 64,
73> 77-79. 83, 104-05, 107, 1:1,
11 in, 120, 136, 140, 158, 166, 243-
44, 246, 271, 280, 286-87
Dickens, Charles, 36, 37, 49, 5c,
116, 134, 163, 167, 168, 198, 249;
Bleak House, 138; Dombey and
Son, 211; Great Expectations,
i78n; Little Dorrit, 306; Oliver
Twist, 51
Dickinson, Emily, 27, 272, 299
diction, 244, 251
Dinadan, Sir, 197
Diogenes, 230, 300
Dionysos and the Dionysiac, 36, 43,
214, 292, 321
direct address, 4, 250
direct experience, 27-28, i88n, 344
displacement, 136-38, 155-56, 188,
190
dithyramb, 295, 302-03
doggerel, 5, 277
Donne, John, 12, 18, 258, 299; An-
niversaries, 298; The Extasie, 143
doodle, 275, 278, 335
Dooley, Mr., 227
Dostoievsky, Feodor, Crime and
Punishment, 46; The Idiot, 48
Douglas, Gavin, 257
Dowland, John, 274
drama, 13, 107-09, 246-50, 262, 268-
70, 272, 282-93; see tragedy, com-
edy, etc.
Drayton, Michael, 66; Polyolbion,
263
dream, 57, 105-12, io5n, 118, 120,
137, 183-86, 193, 206, 215, 243,
250, 272, 277-78, 354
Dream of the Rood, 36, 316
Dreiser, Theodore, 80; An American
Tragedy, 49
Dryden, John, 10, 228, 252, 264,
265, 298; Absalom and Achitoph-
el, 322; Alexander's Feast, 279
Dunbar, William, 257; Ballat of our
Lady, 279; Flyting with Kennedy,
279
Duncan, 217
Easter, 159, 187, 292
ecstasis, 67, 93-94, 301, 326, 326n
Eddas, 54, 56, 306, 314, 317
Eden, 152, 157, 188, 189, 191, 194,
200, 204, 205
Edgar and Edmund, 216, 217
INDEX
Egypt, 189, 190, 191, 194, 198, 205
Egyptian literature, 135, 143, 156,
226, 314, 317
eiron, 40, 172-75, 178, 195, 216,
226-28, 232, 299
elegiac, 36, 43, 296-97
Eliot, George, 312; Adam Bede, 199;
Silas Marner, 198
Eliot, T. S., 18, 19, 63, 65, 67, 80,
92, 98, 102, 269, 280, 324; Ash
Wednesday y 206, 2i4n, 294; The
Cocktail Party j 136, 174, 178, 270;
The Confidential Clerk, 136, 170;
Four Quartets, 122, 153, 206, 301,
316, 321; The Function of Criti-
cism, 18-19; Gerontion, 351; The
Hollow Men, 206; Marina, 302;
Sweeney Agonistes, 279; Sweeney
among the Nightingales, 102; The
Waste Land, 61, 149, 160, 206,
323
Elizabeth I, 153, 284
emblem, 274, 300-01
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 235
encyclopaedic form, 55-58, 60-61,
120, 227, 311, 313, 315-26
epic, 12, 22, 54, 56, 246, 248, 304,
314, 315-26, 3i7n
epigram, 54, 262, 269, 297-98, 329
epiphany, 61, 121-22, 208, 215, 292-
93, 298, 316, 321, 326; point of
epiphany, 203-06, 2i4n, 237, 299,
321, 324; point of demonic epiph-
any, 223, 238, 239
episodic forms, 55-57, 60-61, 293-
303, 324
epitaph, 296-97
epithalamium, 295, 318, 324
epos, 248-50, 251-62, 263, 265, 269-
72, 274, 293-303, 320, 324
epyllion, 324
Erasmus, Desiderius, 227, 230-32,
308, 310-11
Eros, 181, 205
Esdras, 91
essay, 3, 53, 54, 307
ethos, 52, 73, 120, 243-44, 269, 286
euphuism, 264-65, 267
Euripides, 51, 170, 198, 284; Ahes-
tis, 136, 219; Hippolytus, 216;
Ion, 51, 136; Iphigeneia in Aulis,
220; Iphigeneia in Tauris, 109
Everyman, 290
existential projection, 63-65, 139, 211
Exodus, 191, 325
Ezekiel, 146, 149, 191
Fabian Society, 63
Falstaff, 19, 45, 165, 175, 183, 284,
farce, 107, 290, 292
Faulkner, William, The Sound and
the Fury, 98, 238
fiction (genre), 248-50, 269, 278;
prose fiction, 13-14, 40, 80, 303-
14, 320
fictional literature, 33-52, 53, 63, 75,
107, 134, 136, 138, 154, 277, 293,
325
Fielding, Henry, 48, 50, 53, 304;
Jonathan Wild, 223, 228; Tom
Jones, 51, 53, 71, 167, 172, 178,
179, 181, 248, 306, 309
Firbank, Ronald, i73n
Flaubert, Gustave, 61, 278; Bouvard
et Pecuchet, 511; Madame Bovary,
39, 224, 314; Salammho, 149-50
Fletcher, Phineas, The Purple Island,
161
Florimell and Marinell, 153
flyting, 223, 278-79
form, 82-94, 820, 95-98, 111, 115-
16, 119, 131, 341
Forster, E. M., 168
Fort, Charles, 231
Franklin, Benjamin, Poor Richard^ s
Almanac, 227
Frazer, Sir James, 10, 108-09, 148,
193, 20 3n; The Golden Bough,
108-09
Freud, Sigmund, and Freudian criti-
cism, 6, 10, 72, 111, 193, 214,
276-78, 353
Fry, Christopher, 269; The Lady's
Not for Burning, 174, 178
Fuller, Thomas, 75
Galahad, Sir, 151, 196
Galen, 13
Gardens of Adonis, 1 52, 205
Gawain, Sir, 196
373
INDEX
Gay, John, The Beggar's Opera, 178,
lySn
Genesis, 42, 125, 145, 149, 191, 192
genre, 13, 95-99, m, 246-326
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 214, 222
George, St., 137, 189, 192, 194, 195,
317
George, Stefan, 63
Gethsemane, 213
Gibbon, Edward, 75, 85, 265
Gilbert, Stuart, 266
Gilbert, William S., The Mikado,
46, 109
Gilgamesh- epic, 317
Gloucester, 175, 223
Goethe, J. W. von, 65, 90, 283;
Faust, 60, 117, 120, 127, 198, 293,
321, 323
Goldsmith, Oliver, 48, 88; The Vicar
of Wakefield, 171
Goliardic satirists, 57
Goliath, 228, 236
Gospels, 27, 149
Gothic romances, 40, 185, 186
Gower, John, 57
Goya, Francisco, 132
gracioso, 173, i73n
Grail romances, 58, 151, 194, 196,
317
grammar, 244-45, 331-35
Graves, Robert, The White Goddess,
3^3
Gray, Thomas, 257
Greek Anthology, 296
Greene, Graham, 48
Greene, Robert, 182; Friar Bacon,
194; Pandosto, 214
Griselda, 219
hamartia, 36, 38, 41, 162, 210, 213
Hardy, Thomas, 19, 64, 100, 125,
140, 147, 155, 237, 298; The Dy-
nasts, 237; Far from the Madding
Crowd, 199; Jude the Obscure,
222; Tess of the D'Crbervilles, 38,
41. 219
Hasek, Jaroslav, The Good Soldier
Schweik, 48
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 19, 90, 117,
138, 140, 154, 196, 305; The
Blithedale Romance, 202; The
House of the Seven Gables, 306;
The Marble Faun, 101, 137-39,
150; The Scarlet Letter, 41, 92
Hazlitt, William, 8
Heep, Uriah, 1 34
Hegel, G. W. F., 150, 18, 212, 213
Helena, 180, 183
Hemingway, Ernest, For Whom the
Bell Tolls, 98
Hephaistos, 193
Herbert, George, 59, 257, 294, 299;
The Altar, 274; Easter Wings,
274; The Pulley, 300
Hercules, 36, 43, 206, 317
Hermione, 138, 183, 219
Herod, 191, 199
Herodas, 285
Herrick, Robert, 299-301
Hesiod, 57, 317
high mimetic, 34, 37-38, 43-44, 50-
51, 58-59, 62-65, 116, 138, 151,
153, 270, 318-19
historical criticism, 24, 343-46
history of taste, 9, 18, 25
history-play, 283-84, 289
Hogarth, William; The Rake's Prog-
ress, 274
Hogg, James, Confessions of a Justi-
fied Sinner, 312
Homer, 52, 53, 56, 57, 63, 96, 156,
210, 231, 248, 259, 318, 320, 345;
Hymns, 294; Iliad, 142, 219, 246,
248, 318, 310; Odyssey, 52, 159,
248, 313, 318, 319, 321, 322
Hooker, Richard, 119
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 151, 154,
263, 272, 294, 297
Horace, 65, 292, 299; Carmen Saecu-
lare, 295; Regulus ode, 296
Hosea, 193
Housman, A. E., 125, 147, 298
Hudson, W. H., 196; Green Man-
sions, 101, 200
Hugo, Victor, 65, 302; Hernani, 283;
Ld^endes des Sidcles, 320
Hulme, T. E,, 326
humanities, study of, 3, 126, 333,
342^ 349
Hume, David, 85
humors, 168-69, 226-27, 285, 287,
290, 312
374
INDEX
Huxley, Aldous, i73n, 230, 308, 310;
Brave New World, 231, 308;
Chrome Yellow, 179; Point Coun-
terpoint, 308
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 18, 154, 155
Huysmans, Joris Karl, A Rebours,
63, 186
hybris, 36, 210, 213, 218, 282
hymn, 257, 294-95
lago, 216, 351
Ibsen, Henrik, 5, 90, 135; Brand, 39;
Emperor and Galilean, 5; Ghosts,
181; Little Eyolf, 181, 220; Peer
Gynt, 5, 117, 195, 293; When Wc
Dead Awaken, 206; The Wild
Duck, 180
ideogram, 123, 275, 333
idyllic, 43
image and imagery, 84-86, 91-92, 99,
103, 123, 158, 244, 246, 274, 281;
imagism, 274
Imogen (Fidele), 138, 183
induction, 7, 15-16
ingenu, 232
initiative, 246, 271, 275, 277-78, 293
inscape, 121
intention, 86-87, 86n, 89, 112-13,
246
Iphigeneia, 211, 220
Irish literature, 269, 324
ironic mode, 34, 40-49, $2, 60-66,
81, 116, 134-35, 13^^ 14^^ ^51^
154, 162, 271-72, 321-24
irony (mythos), 105, 140, 176-77,
igT,, 210-25, 219, 221, 223-39,
285-89, 297
Isaiah, 56, 145, 201, 236, 342
Isis, 201, 322
Jacob, 193, 204
James, Henry, 19, 50, 92, 117, 154,
267, 304, 308, 311, The Al-
tar of the Dead, 42-43; Daisy Mil-
ler, 38; The Other House, loi;
The Sacred Fount, 180; The Sense
of the Past, 190; The Spoils of
Poynton, 155; The Turn of the
Screw, 202
Jannequin, Clement, 266
Japanese drama and lyric, 283, 297
jargon, 328, 330-31
Jeans, Sir James, The Mysterious
Universe, 352
Jephthah's daughter, 220
Jesuit poetry, 59
Jesus Christ, 36, 42, 102, 121, 122,
126, 141, 189-91, 194-95, 199,
205-08, 211, 213, 215, 232, 282,
292, 293, 300, 316, 318, 320, 325;
see Messiah
Job, Book of, 42, 140, 142, 189, 292,
316, 324, 325
Johnson, Samuel, 8, 67, 257-60, 270,
327; Rasselas, 200
Jonah, 190
Jonson, Ben, 48, 58, 84, 164, 168,
231, 290; The Alchemist, 174,
178, 180, 228; Every Man in His
Humour, 174; The Silent Woman,
168; Volpone, 45, 165, 175
Joshua, 191, 205
Joyce, James, 42, 48, 61, 62, 117,
121, 122, 23^ 266, 278, 313, 323,
325, 334; Dubliners, 307; Firme-
gansWake, 61, 62, 236, 277, 313-
14, 321, 323, 354; Portrait, 77,
249, 308; Ulysses, 222, 266, 313-
i 4 > 323
Jung, C. G., and Jungian cnticism,
6, 72, 108, 111, i46n, i92n, 193,
i98n, 214, 277, 291
Juno, 142
Juvenal, 229
Kafka, Franz, 42, 138; In the Penal
Colony, 238; The Trial, 42
Kalevda, 56
Kant, Immanuel, i5n, i22n
katabasis {nekyia), 321
kataplous, 233
Katharina, 172
Keats, John, 4, 60, 256; Endymion,
151, 160, 200, 205, 321; Hyperion,
59, 262, 321; Ode on a Grecian
Urn, 257, 301
kenning, 81, 280
Kierkegaard, S0ren, 115; Either /Or,
115, 313; Repetition, 345
Kingsl^, Charles, 36; The Water-
Babies, 310
375
INDEX
Kipling, Rudyard, The Jungle Book,
. "55
kmttelvers, 277
Koran, 55, 56, 294
Korzybsky, Alfred, 350
Lamb, Charles, 8
Lancelot, Sir, 180, 196, 197
Landor, Walter Savage, Imaginary
Conversations, 310
Langland, William, 318
language, 74, 331-37
Latimer, Hugh, 327
Lawes, Henry, 274
Lawrence, D, H., i45n, 232
Lenin, Nikolai, 349
Leontes, 184
Lethe, 153, 200
leviathan, i44n, 189-92, 194, 292
Lewis, C. S., 117
Lewis, Wyndham, i88n, 267; Men
Without Art, 267
lexis, 244-45,
liberal education, 3, 15, 114, 121,
148, i;6, 347-49
Lilliputians, 277
Lincoln, Abraham, 327
Lindsay, Vachel, The Congo, 279
literal meaning, 76-82, 92, 97, 116,
123
literature, 8, 13, 17-19, 62, 74, 79,
350-51
Lodge, Thomas, Wits Miserie, 227
logic, 244-45, 329, 331-37, 350-51
Logos, 120-21, 126, 134
Loki, 36
Longfellow, Henry W., Hiawatha,
^54
Longinus, 66-67, 326, 326n
low mimetic, 34, 38, 42, 44-45, 49-
52, 58-60, 63, 65, 96, 110, 116,
124, 137-38, 151, 154-55, ^7°’
272, 281, 320-21, 324
Lowell, James Russell, 281; Biglow
Papers, 227
Lucian, 230, 231, 308, 309; Kata-
pious, 233; Sde of Lives, 230;
True History, 235
Lucifer, 212
Lucretius, 85, 323
Lydgate, John, i86n, 252-55, 318;
Danse Macabre, 252
Lyly, John, 182; Campaspe, 230
lyric, 246-47, 249-50, 262, 270-81,
293-303
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 85,
265
Machiavellian villain, 216
MacLeish, Archibald, Ars Poetica, 5
Macrobius, Saturnalia, 311
madrigal, 273-74
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 290-91
Mahabharata, 56, 317
malcontent, 176, 230
Mallarm6, Stephane, 61, 63, 80, 87,
92, 122; Coup de Dds, 264
Malory, Sir Thomas, 57, 197
Malvolio, 165, 167, 176
Mammon, Sir Epicure, 180, 228
Manet, Edouard, 132, 136
Mankynd, 291
Mann, Thomas, 110
Mansfield, Katharine, 305
Marlowe, Christopher, 284; Faustus,
39, 222, 292; The Jew of Malta,
222; Tamburlaine, 39, 208, 216,
283
Marston, John, 176, 236
Marvell, Andrew, 144, 301; The Gar-
den, 85, 144; Ode on Cromwell,
296
Marx, Karl, and Marxist criticism, 6,
12, 72, 113, 127, 343, 346
Masaccio, 132
masque, 13, 107, 164, 171, 282, 287-
93 ^ 301
Matelda, 151
mathematics, 16, 76, 93, 287, 329,
333 ^ 350 ' 34 . 354 ^
Maturin, Charles Robert, Melmoth
the Wanderer, 312
medieval art and criticism, 34-35, 51,
57, 62-63, 72, 100, 115-16, 142,
152, 160, 203, 227, 282, 341, 543
Medusa, 196
melodrama, 40, 47, 167
melos, 244, 255-57, 262-63, 266-67,
270, 275, 278-79, 325-26, 328
Melville, Herman, 19, 117, 304; Bil-
ly Buddy 41; Moby Dick, 92, 100,
INDEX
155, 336, 304, 313; Pierre, 39,
200, 237
Menander, 43, 51, 163, 170, 171,
178, 181, 183
Menippus, 230, 309, 310; Menip-
pean satire, 14, 309-12; see anat-
omy
Mercury, 43
Mercutio, 37
Meredith, George, 304; The Egoist^
304; Love in the Valley, 254
Merlin, 195
Messiah, 55, 189-92, 205, 295, 316-
17, 321, 342
metamorphosis, 144
metaphor, 72, 89, 91, 123-25, 136-
39, 141-44, 150-51, 158, 188-89,
191, 267, 281, 332, 334-37, 352-
54- 35311
metaphysical poetry, 59, 91-92, 204,
257, 281, 299
metre, 56, 246, 248, 251-62, 263-64,
269-72, 324
Micawber, Wilkins, 168, 169, 173
Michael, 191, 213, 320, 321
Middle Comedy, 164, 175
Middleton, Thomas, A Trick to
Catch the Old One, 175
miles gloriosus, 39, 40, 165, 172
Mill, James, Essay on Governmerit,
330
Mill, John Stuart, 5, 249, 308; Essay
on Liberty, 348-49
Milton, John, 18, 23-25, 83, 91, 94-
98, 101, 121, 152, 161, 211-13,
228, 232, 247, 248, 257, 261, 263,
274, 318, 320, 323, 324; Areopa^
gitica, 327, 348-49; Comus, 64,
149-53, ^95^ ^ 9 ^J
legro and IlPenseroso, 66, 81, 301;
Lycidas, 67, 97, 100-02, 121-22,
324; Nativity Ode, 153, 342; Para-
dise Lost, 58, 160, 191, 200, 204,
211, 216-18, 247-48, 320-21, 324;
Paradise Regained, 96, 191, 205;
prose works, 142, 266, 267; Sam-
son Agonistes, 67, 207, 215, 220,
221, 223
mime, 285-86, 297
mimesis (imitation), 82-84, 93, 95,
97, 113, 119, 131, 148, 214-15,
250, 269, 285, 289, 301
Minotaur, 190
Miranda, 151
Mirror for Magistrates, 30, i86n
Mohammedanism, 35
moira, 210
Moli^re, 48, 112, 163, 167-68; Le
Malade Imaginaire, 112, 114; Le
Misanthrope, 167, 218; Tartuffe,
40, 45, 176, 179, 181
monad, 121
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 53,
232, 307
Montgomery, Robert, 4
Moore, Marianne, Camellia Sabina,
278
Moore, Sturge, 93
morality play, 1 3, 90, 290-91
More, St. Thomas, Utopia, 233
Monis, William, 154, 202, 267, 270,
305, 306; The Earthly Paradise,
203; The Sundering Flood, 200
Moses, 51, 146, 190-91, 198-99, 204-
05. 350
motif, 74, 77, 82
movie, 13, 107, 164, 179, 288-89
Mozart, W. A., 290, 343, 344; Don
Giovanni, 175, 289; Figaro, 173,
181, 289; Jupiter Symphony, 133;
The Magic Flute, 145
Murasaki, Lady, Tale of Genji, i86n,
324
Murry, Middleton, 19
Muspilli, 317
myth and the mythical mode, vii, 33,
55-56, 42 - 45 ’ 48-49, 52, 54, 62,
64-65, 72, 75, 106-10, 116-18, 120-
21, 134-239, 270, 282, 294-96,
joo, 306, 315, 317, 325-26, 341,
552-54
mythoi (generic narratives), 140,
162-239
mythos (plot, narrative, etc.), 52-53,
75’ 77’ 79’ 82-83, 104-07, 136,
171, 245-44’ 271, 285-86, 310,
526, 342
naive, 35, 37-38, 103-04, 107, 109,
186
Napoleon, no, 237
377
INDEX
Nashe, Thomas, 227, 231, 236, 281;
Pierce Penilesse, 227
naturalism, 42, 49, 79, 80, 116, 136
Nebuchadnezzar, 149, 354
nemesis, 209, 213, 216
neO'Classical art and criticism, 83,
116, 154
New Comedy, 43-45, 163, 215
new criticism, 66, 82, Szn, 86, 116,
140, 273, 334
Newman, John Henry Cardinal, 10;
Apologia, 307
New Yorker, 87, i73n
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62, 99, 207,
214, 232, 302, 346; Ecce Homo,
99; Also Sprach Zarathustra, 155,
214, 2i4n
North, Christopher, Nodes Ambrosi-
anae, 312
novel, 13, 247, 303-14, 322
Oberon, 174
O'Casey, Sean, 269; Juno and the
Pay cock, 163
Octavia, 219
Oedipus, 107, 137, 181, 193, 353;
see Sophocles
0 . Henry, 268
Old Comedy, 43-45, 164, 250
omens, 139
Omphale, 228
O'Neill, Eugene, The Hairy Ape, 238
onomatopoeia, 258-62
opera, 13, 107, 282-83, 288-89
Ophelia, 217
opsis, 244, 258-59, 262-63, 267-68,
270, 275, 278, 280, 326
oracles and oracular poetry, 55-56,
81, 260, 271-72, 277-78, 293-94,
398, 302, 316, 324, 353
oratorio, 283
Orpheus, 36, 55, 121, 148, 192
Orwell, George, 1984, 238, 331
Osiris, 192, 317
Ossian, 303
ouroboros, 150, 157
Ovid, 54, 63, 98, 317
Owl and the Nightingale, The, 299
Palestrina, 344
panegyric, 295-96, 327
378
parable, 53, 56, 300, 324-25
Paracelsus, 235
parasite, 166, 168, 175
parody, 103, 147-50, 157, 177, 184,
202, 223, 233-35, 238, 277, 313,
321-24
Parolles, 165
paronomasia, 65, 276, 332
Pascal, Blaise, 326
Passion, 36, 178, 220, 221
pastoral, 43, 99-101, 143-44, 152,
176, 296-97, 301
pastourelle, 299
Pater, Walter, 238, 267, 272
pathos, 38-39, 217
pathos, 187, 192
Paul, St., 125
Peacock, Thomas Love, 230, 309,
310, 312
Pearl, The, 277, 294
Peele, George, 182; The Arraignment
of Paris, 284
Penelope, 318, 322, 323
Perseus, 51, 137, 189, 195, 198, 199
Petrarch, Francesco, 299
Petronius, 235, 309-10; Satyricon,
236
philosophy, 329-31, 337; philosophus
gloriosus, 39, 173, 229-31
pharmakos, 41, 45, 148-49
picaresque novel, 45, 310
Picasso, Pablo, 344
Pindaric ode, 257, 295
Pirandello, Luigi, 291
plain dealer, 176, 178, 218
Plato, 108, 111, 182, 231, 243, 286,
310, 326, 329, 345, 346, 554;
Apology, 46, 211; Cratylus, 65;
Euthydemus, 286; Ion, 65; Laws,
286; Phaedrus, 65; Republic, 65,
113, 143, 182, 346; Symposium,
63, 65, 289; Platonism, 59, 64,
113, 127
Plautus, 43, 163-65, 174, 178; Casi'
na, 167; Rudens, 191
Podsnap, 347
Poe, Edgar Allan, 116, 139, 140, 243,
276, 277, 305, 326; The Bells,
279; Eleonora, 200; Eureka, 161;
The Gold Bug, 204, 204n; Ligeia,
INDEX
139; The Poetic Principle , 243,
272, 273, 278; The Raven , 278
poetic etymology, 277, 334
poetics, 14, 22, 71, 132
Polonius, 174-75
Polyphemus, 148, 172, 228
Pope, Alexander, 96, 168, 225, 226,
252, 256, 258-61, 298; The Dun -
dad , 238; Essay on Criticism , 78,
258, 261 n; Essay on Man , 85; The
Messiah , 257; The Rape of the
Lock , 183, 256
popular art and literature, 4, 104,
108, 116-17, 251, 276
Portia, 174, 182
poulterer's measure, 263
Pound, Ezra, 80, 123, 136, 244, 272,
275, 326, 349n; Cantos , 61, 272,
324
prayer, 249, 294
primitive art and literature, 17, 104,
108, 116-17, 135, 282
proairesiSf 210, 212
Prometheus, 42, 62, 145, 155, 157,
207, 321, 334; see Aeschylus
Promised Land, 191, 194, 204
prose, 13, 71, 79-80, 123, 250, 263-
68, ^69-72, 277-78, 293-503, 303-
314, 324-35 326-37
Proserpine, 138, 153, 160, 183
Prospero, 44, 151, 157, 174, 180, 195,
199, 238
Proust, Marcel, 61, i22n, 266, 313,
321. 333
proverb (aphorism), 56, 298, 324
Psalms, 76, 99, 294, 295
Ptolemaic universe, 161, 204, 206
public critic, 8, 10-11
Puck, 153, 173, 174
Purcell, Henry, 136
Pygmalion, 138
Pythagoras, 352
quantity, 251, 258, 262
quest, 187-90, 192-96, 200, 215, 220,
316-24
Quilp, Daniel, 134
Quintilian, 311
Rabelais, Frangois, 230, 232-36, 266,
308-13, 322, 325
Racine, Jean, 37, 95; Athdie , 219,
221; Esther , 207, 222
Ramayana , 56
Raphael, 151, 213, 320
realism, 42, 49, 80, 131, 134-40, 162,
166, 197, 285, 314
religion, 19, 24, 125-28, 231-32, 337
Renaissance, 13, 16, 34, 44, 58, 59,
84, 92, 101, 116, 131, 160, 165,
166, 172, 175, 186, 196, 208, 273,
283, 288, 310, 341
repetition, 168, i68n, 327-31, 345-
46
Revelation, Book of, 108, 141, 144,
146, 149-50, 189
Reynard the Fox , 229
rhetoric, 21-22, 24, 61, yin, 72, 95,
166, 244-47, 258-60, 262, 264-67,
269, 271, 277, 280, 294, 326-37,
350-52
Richardson, Samuel, 116; Clarissa ,
39; Pamela , 44, 183, 313
riddle, 81, 280, 300
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 61, 6in, 62, 63,
80, 122, 301, 302
Rimbaud, Jean Arthur, 61, 62, 80,
302; Saison en Enfer , 303
ritual, vii, 55, 72, 105-09, 112, 117-
20, 148, 163, 165, 171, 183, 189,
193, 215, 243, 250, 272, 343
Robin Hood, 196
Robinson, E. A., 152
Rochester, Lord, 114
Rogers, Will, 227
Roland, 36
romance (mode), 33, 36-37, 43, 49-
51, 58, 64-65, 116, 136-37, 151,
154, 211, 270, 272, 501
romance { mythos )^ 107-08, 117,
162, 177, 182, 185, 186-203, 206,
214-16, 219, 223, 225, 235, 237,
306, 316-18
romance (prose fiction), 304-07,
308-09, 324
Romantic agony, 60, 1 57
Romanticism, 4, 23, 25, 35, 56, 60,
63, 80, 89, 96, 110, 114, 157, 247,
272, 306 _
romantic stylizing, 49, 136, 139-40,
144, 151-53, 157, 162, 283, 32:
Romaunt of the Rose , 56
379
INDEX
Ros, Amanda, 329
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 60, 307,
353-54; J^mile, 308
Ruskin, John, 9, 10, 36, 93, 114,
154, 267, 328; The King of the
Golden River, 198; The Queen of
the Air, 341
Sade, Marquis de, 114
Sagas, 58, 306
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 8
Sdkuntala, 171, 191
Sam Slick, 227
Sandburg, Carl, 200
Satan, 189, 191, 205, 206, 212, 218,
238, 239, 320
satire, 22, 54, 56, 63, 127, 156, 162,
166, 177, 192, 206, 223-39, 297-
98, 309-14, 322
Saturnalia, 171
Scarlatti, D., 279
Schelling, F. W. J. von, 337
Schiller, Friedrich, 35, 211, 218, 283
science, 7, 8, 15-17, 19, 231, 243,
277. 337. 354
science fiction, 49, 203
Scott, Sir Walter, 302, 305, 306;
Ivanhoe, 101; St. Ronan's Well,
173; Waverley, 306
scriptural form, 56, 120, 248, 314,
315-26
Scrooge, Ebenezer, 277
Seneca, 222
'‘sentimental,” 35, 37
sermon, 249, 296, 326
Shakespeare, William, 4, 5, 8, 20,
21, 23, 24, 37, 44, 52, 58, 86-
88, 91, 94-96, 100, 108, 111, 116-
17, 144, 149, 152, 164, 166, 169,
173, 174, 208, 210, 236, 247, 257,
262, 263, 286, 290, 297, 323, 328,
345; AlVs Well, 176, 179, 180,
183, 218; Antony and Cleopatra,
51, 218, 236, 237, 292; As You
Like it, 163, 176, 182, 218; Com-
edy of Errors, 166, 175, 179, 184,
185; Coriolanus, 237; Cymbeline,
138, 183, 207, 219; Hamlet, 6 , 9,
10, 39, 67, 76, 84, 87, 89, 140,
148, 175, 207, 208, 211, 212, 218,
236, 237, 284, 292, 342, 351;
380
Henry V, 221, 284, 328; Henry
VIII, 236; Julius Caesar, 45; King
John, 217; King Lear, 38, 88, 94,
175, 211, 212, 215, 216, 218, 222,
223, 237, 262, 302; Love's Labor's
Lost, 169, 183; Macbeth, 85, 88,
94, 208, 211, 212, 213, 223, 284,
292; Measure for Measure, 174,
178, 183, 185, 271; TheMerchant
of Venice, 45, 165, 182; The Mer-
ry Wives of Windsor, 165, 167,
175, 182, 183; A Midsummer
Night's Dream, 66, 166, 182, 287;
Much Ado, 49, 138, 173, 183;
Othello, 9, 38, 39, 210, 211, 216,
236, 237, 328, 351; Pericles, 179,
183, 184, 185, 201, 202, 289; The
Phoenix and the Turtle, 143; Rich-
ard II, 217, 284; Richard III, 284;
Romeo and Juliet, 37, 216, 220,
222; Sonnets, 98, 281, 298; The
Taming of the Shrew, 164, 172,
173; The Tempest, 21, 44, 64,
117, 151, 174, 176, 184, 185, 191,
202, 286, 287, 290; Timon of
Athens, 221; Titus Andronicus,
207, 222, 223, 292; Troilus and
Cressida, 214, 225; Twelfth Night,
184, 185; The Two Gentlemen of
Verona, 117, 182; Venus and Ado-
nis, 36; The Winter's Tale, 117,
138, 181, 182, 183, 184, 214, 219
Shaw, George Bernard, 23, 48, 63,
64, 135, 154, 163, 250, 263, 269,
286; Back to Methuselah, 287;
Getting Married, 286; Heartbreak
House, 178; King Charles, 287;
Major Barbara, 170; Man and Su-
perman, 287; The Quintessence of
Ibsenism, 286; Saint Joan, 220,
284
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 12, 18, i8n,
23, 24, 26, 60, 65, 100, 147, 155,
157, 322; Adonais, 121; Epipsy-
chidion, 151, 246; Ode to the
West Wind, 246, 302; Ozyman-
dias, 150; Prometheus Unbound,
321; The Revolt of Islam, 1 57, 205
Shylock, 45, 148, 166, 169, 176, 178
Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 62, 303; Apol-
ogy, 58, 62, 76; Arcadia, 100
INDEX
Siegfried and Siegmund, 193, 219
sign, 73, 78-79, 102, 300, 335, 353
Sisyphus, 259
Sitwell, Dame Edith, i44n, 324
Skelton, John, 257, 279; The Gar-
land of Laurell, 279, 280; Philip
Sparowe, 253
Sly, Christopher, 184
Smart, Christopher, 302; Jubilate Ag-
no, 276; Song to David, 257
Smiles, Samuel, 45
Smollett, Tobias, Humphry Clinker,
179
Socrates, 40, 46, 286
Sodom, 317
Solveig, 195, 322
Song of Songs, 152, 193, 316
Sophocles, 95, 111, 139, 158; Ajax,
157, 208, 216, 289; Antigone, 148,
212, 218; Oedipus at Colonus,
218, 221; Oedipus Tyrannus, 95,
111, 168, 209, 212, 219, 222; Phi-
loctetes, 207, 220
Southey, Robert, 257, 318; The Doc-
tor, 312; Thalaba,
Southwell, Robert, 145, 146
sparagmos, 148, 192-93, 222
Spengler, Oswald, 160, 343
Spenser, Edmund, 10, 90, 117, 149,
151-54, 194-97, ^^9^
263, 277, 317, 323; Epithalamion,
324; The Faerie Queene, vii, 58,
64, 90-91, 100-101, 138, 144, 148,
149, 151, 194, 195, 200-205, ^5^"
61, 318, 324; Mutabilitie Cantoes,
140, 204, 299; Shepheards Calen-
der, 62, 99, 260
Spinoza, Baruch, 329, 335
sprezzatura, 93-94
Stein, Gertrude, 266, 329
Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of
Wrath, 53, 98; Of Mice and Men,
238
Stendhal, 45
Sterne, Laurence, 266, 312, 322;
Tristram Shandy, 234, 267, 303,
312, 313, 325
Stevens, Wallace, i44n
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom*s
Cabin, 38, 39, 53, 199
Strindberg, August, 291
Struldbrugs, 235
style, 75, 93, 115, 267-69, 273, 303,
330-31
suppliant, 217
Surrey, Earl of, 257
Sutherland, Graham, 136
Swift, Jonathan, 39, 229-32, 235,
309, 311, 322; Gulliver's Travels,
14,' 87, 231, 233, 23;, 236, 303,
308, 313, 321; A Modest Proposal,
224; A Tale of a Tub, 234, 325;
poems, 298
Swinburne, Algernon C., 147, 302,
328
symbol and symbolism, vii, 71-122,
243, 300, 316, 333; see image,
archetype, etc.
symbolisme, 60, 63, 80, 81, 92, 116,
274, 300
symposium, 59, 63, 143, 286-87, 310-
12
Synge, John Millington, 269; The
Playboy of the Western World,
40; Riders to the Sea, 168
Tasso, Torquato, 90, 149; Jerusalem
Delivered, 58
Taylor, Jeremy, 265, 267, 268
Teiresias, 216, 218, 323
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 18, 37, 112,
114, 152, 255, 256, 268, 277; Oe-
none, 255, 258; The Passing of
Arthur, 37
Terence, 43, 163-67, 178; Adelphoi,
169, 181; Eunuchus, 181
texture, 72, 82, 334, 341
Thackeray, William M., Vanity Fair,
34
Thames, 154, 323
thematic literature, 52-62, 66-67,
107, no, 116, 136, 138, 154, 293,
325-26
Theocritus, 99, 101, 121
Thersites, 176, 225, 230
Theseus, 183, 190
Thomas Aquinas, St., and Thomist
criticism, 6, 72, 85, 329
Thoreau, Henry David, 237
Tliurber, James, The Thirteen
Clocks, 193
Tintem Abbey, 154
381
INDEX
Toby, Uncle, 227
Tolstoy, Leo, 4, 237, 311; Anna Ka-
renina, 139; Resurrection, 140;
War and Peace, 237
topoi, 103
Towneley cycle, 282, 292
Tractatus Coislinianus, 166, 169
tragedy (drama), 13, 37, 75, 94-95,
117, 147, 164-65, 176, 269, 282,
283-85, 289, 292, 297, 326
tragedy (mythos), 22, 35-42, 54, 64-
65 . 95r io5» i57» 19^^
198, 206-23, 236-37, 239, 304
Traherne, Thomas, Centuries of
Meditation, 302
Trinity, 36, 142
Trollope, Anthony, 305, 307
Trophonius, Cave of, 353
Trotwood, Betsey, 227
Troy, 214, 218, 318
Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn,
157, 180, 259; Tom Sawyer, 190,
..
typology, vii, 14, 191, 204, 315-16
Udall, Nicholas, Ralph Roister Dois-
ter, 173
Ulysses (Odysseus), 214, 319, 320,
334
Una, 194
Upanishads, 124, 143, 329
Urquhart, Sir Tbomas, 236
Val6ry, Paul, 80, 122
value-judgements, 18-29, 265, 336,
343'44
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 327
Varro, 309, 311
Vaughan, Henry, 145, 302
Vedic hymns, 87, 294
Velasquez, Diego, 132
Venus, 137, 144, 205, 258, 297, 321-
23
vice, 173-76, 216
Victorians, 63, 134, 156, 249, 328
Vida, Marco Girolamo, Art of Poe-
try, 260
Virgil, 65, 96, 99-ioa, 142, 149, 157,
212, 239, 318, 323, 342; Aeneid,
248, 318-22; Eclogues, 295, 342
Virgin Mary, 152, 191, 205, 284, 323
382
Voltaire, 230, 309-11; Candida, 231,
308; LTngenu, 232
Wagner, Richard, 189, 196, 203, 266,
274, 283; Parsifal, 189, 283; Tann-
hduser, 152; Tristan, 283; Die Wal-
kiire, 152
Waller, Edmund, 252
Walton, Izaak, 310; The Compleat
Angler, 312
Wanderer, The, 259
Ward, Artemus, 227
Waugh, Evelyn, 48, i73n
Webster, John, 4, 284; The Duchess
of Mdfi, 219-20, 222; The White
Devil, 216, 220
Wells, H. G., Tono-Bungay, 155
Western story, 43
Weyland, 193
Whitman, Walt, 100-03, 236, 302;
Out of the Cradle, 123-24; When
Lilacs Last, 102
Widsith, 57
Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel, 18
Wilde, Oscar, 25, 48, i73n
Wilder, Thornton, Heaven* s My Des-
tination, 48
Williams, Charles, 117
Williams, Oscar, 28 in
wit, 276-77, 281, 294, 298, 329
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 122, 329
Wodehouse, P. G. 173
Woden, 193
Woolf, Virginia, 140; Between the
Acts, 61, 203; Mrs. Dalloway, 41,
179; To the Lighthouse, 92, 206;
The Waves, 234
Wordsworth, William, 5, 39, 60, 61,
85, 94, 124, 154, 225, 257, 271,
296, 298, 299, 301, 306; The Idiot
Boy, 257; Peter Bell, 257;. The
Prelude, 60
Wulfstan, 265, 265n
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 257, 261, 279
Wycherley, William, 176; The Coun-
try Wife, 181
Yeats, William Butler, 61-64,
93, 102, 103, 124, 125, 145, 202,
208, 2i4n, 232, 272, 273, 283,
302; The Countess Cathleen, 293;
INDEX
Leda, 102; Sailing to Byzantium, Zeus, 35, 145, 210, 231, 320
66, 146, 206, 302; The Tower, Zion, 317
122, 206, 302; The Two Trees, Zola, femile, 49, 80, 92; Germinal,
149; A Vision, 161, 323; The 140
Winding Stair, 206
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